An Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian finite element method

This paper describes an Arbitrary Lagrangian- Eulerian (ALE) finite element method for the simulation of fluid domains with moving structures. The fluid is viscous, incompressible and unsteady and the fluid motion is solved by a fractional step discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations. The emphasis is on convection dominated flows, and a three-step method is used for the convection term. The moving structure causes the mesh of the fluid domain to move, and a new algorithm is proposed to solve the important and crucial problem of the calculation of the mesh velocities.Numerical calculations of the added mass and added damping of a vibrating two-dimensional circular cylinder in the frequency Reynolds number range Rew=20−2000 are performed to evaluate the proposed ALE finite element method. The numerically calculated added mass and added damping are compared to both analytical and numerical results. To further demonstrate the generality of the method, a numerical simulation of flow past an oscillating schematic sports car is presented.