A partitioned approach for the coupling of SPH and FE methods for transient nonlinear FSI problems with incompatible time‐steps

Summary We propose a method to couple smoothed particle hydrodynamics and finite elements methods for nonlinear transient fluid–structure interaction simulations by adopting different time‐steps depending on the fluid or solid sub‐domains. These developments were motivated by the need to simulate highly non‐linear and sudden phenomena requiring the use of explicit time integrators on both sub‐domains (explicit Newmark for the solid and Runge–Kutta 2 for the fluid). However, due to critical time‐step required for the stability of the explicit time integrators in, it becomes important to be able to integrate each sub‐domain with a different time‐step while respecting the features that a previously developed mono time‐step coupling algorithm offered. For this matter, a dual‐Schur decomposition method originally proposed for structural dynamics was considered, allowing to couple time integrators of the Newmark family with different time‐steps with the use of Lagrange multipliers. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.