A stabilised immersed boundary method on hierarchical b-spline grids

In this work, an immersed boundary finite element method is proposed which is based on a hierarchically refined cartesian b-spline grid and employs the non-symmetric and penalty-free version of Nitsche’s method to enforce the boundary conditions. The strategy allows for h- and p-refinement and employs a so-called ghost penalty term to stabilise the cut cells. An effective procedure based on hierarchical subdivision and sub-cell merging, which avoids excessive numbers of quadrature points, is used for the integration of the cut cells. A basic Laplace problem is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the cut cell stabilisation and of the penalty-free Nitsche method as well as their impact on accuracy. The methodology is also applied to the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, where the SUPG/PSPG stabilisation is employed. Simulations of the lid-driven cavity flow and the flow around a cylinder at low Reynolds number show the good performance of the methodology. Excessive ill-conditioning of the system matrix is robustly avoided without jeopardising the accuracy at the immersed boundaries or in the field. •Non-symmetric and penalty-free Nitsche method applied in the context of an immersed method.•Non-symmetric and penalty-free Nitsche method applied to the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations.•Ghost penalty based cut cell stabilisation applied to higher order b-spline basis functions.•Integration of cut cells with sub-cell merging.•Comprehensive study of accuracy and matrix condition numbers.