Immersed boundary methods are a class of techniques in computational fluid dynamics where the Navier-Stokes equations are simulated on a computational grid that does not conform to the interfaces in the domain of interest. This facilitates the simulation of flows with complex moving and deforming geometries without considerable effort wasted in generating the mesh. The first part of this dissertation is concerned with the aerodynamics of the cross-section of a species of flying snake, Chrysopelea paradisi (paradise tree snake). Past experiments have shown that the unique cross-section of this snake, which can be described as a lifting bluff body, produces an unusual lift curve--with a pronounced peak in lift coefficient at an angle of attack of 35 degrees for Reynolds numbers 9000 and beyond. We studied the aerodynamics of the cross-section using a 2-D immersed boundary method code. We were able to qualitatively reproduce the spike in the lift coefficient at the same angle of attack for flows beyond a Reynolds number of 2000. This phenomenon was associated with flow separation at the leading edge of the body that did not result in a stall. This produced a stronger vortex and an associated reduction in pressure on the dorsal surface of the snake cross-section, which resulted in higher lift. The second part of this work deals with the analysis of the direct forcing method, which is a popular immersed boundary method for flows with rigid boundaries. We begin with the fully discretized Navier-Stokes equations along with the appropriate boundary conditions applied at the solid boundary, and derive the fractional step method as an approximate block LU decomposition of this system. This results in an alternate formulation of the direct forcing method that takes into consideration mass conservation at the immersed boundaries and also handles the pressure boundary conditions more consistently. We demonstrate that this method is between first and second-order accurate in space when linear interpolation is used to enforce the boundary conditions on velocity. We then develop a theory for the order of accuracy of the direct forcing method with linear interpolation. For a simple 1-D case, we show that the method can converge at a range of rates for different locations of the solid body with respect to the mesh. But this effect averages out in higher dimensions and results in a scheme that has the same order of accuracy as the expected order of accuracy of the interpolation at the boundary. The discrete direct forcing method for the Navier-Stokes equations exhibits an order of accuracy between 1 and 2 because the velocities at the boundary are linearly interpolated, but the resulting boundary conditions on the pressure gradient turn out to be only first-order accurate. We recommend linearly interpolating the pressure gradient as well to make the method fully second-order accurate. We have also developed two open source codes in the course of these studies. The first, cuIBM, is a two-dimensional immersed boundary method code that runs on a single GPU. It can simulate incompressible flow around rigid bodies with prescribed motion. It is based on the general idea of a fractional step method as an approximate block LU decomposition, and can incorporate any type of immersed boundary method that can be made to fit within this framework. The second code, PetIBM, can simulate both two and three-dimensional incompressible flow and runs in parallel on multiple CPUs. Both codes have been validated using well-known test cases.

Dans cette thèse, une nouvelle méthode de frontières immergées a été développée pour la simulation d'interaction fluide-structure, appelée la méthode de frontières immergées mobiles (en langage anglo-saxon: MIBM). L'objectif principal de cette nouvelle méthode est de déplacer arbitrairement les solides à géométrie complexe dans un fluide visqueux incompressible, sans remailler le domaine fluide. Cette nouvelle méthode a l'avantage d'imposer la condition de non-glissement à l'interface d'une manière exacte via une force sans introduire des constantes artificielles modélisant la structure rigide. Cet avantage conduit également à la satisfaction de la condition CFL avec un pas de temps plus grand. Pour un calcul précis de la force induite par les frontières mobiles, un système linéaire a été introduit et résolu par la méthode de gradient conjugué. La méthode proposée peut être intégrée facilement dans des solveurs résolvant les équations de Navier-Stokes. Dans ce travail la MIBM a été mise en œuvre en couplage avec un solveur fluide utilisant une méthode de projection adaptée pour obtenir des solutions d'ordre deux en temps et en espace. Le champ de pression a été obtenu par l'équation de Poisson qui a été résolue à l'aide de la méthode du gradient conjugué préconditionné par la méthode multi-grille. La combinaison de ces deux méthodes a permis un gain de temps considérable par rapport aux méthodes classiques de la résolution des systèmes linéaires. De plus le code de calcul développé a été parallélisé sur l'unité graphique GPU équipée de la bibliothèque CUDA pour aboutir à des hautes performances de calcul. Enfin, comme application de nos travaux sur la MIBM, nous avons étudié le couplage "fort" d'interaction fluide-structure (IFS). Pour ce type de couplage, un schéma implicite partitionné a été adopté dans lequel les conditions à l'interface sont satisfaites via un schéma de type "point fixe". Pour réduire le temps de calcul inhérent à cette application, un nouveau schéma de couplage a été proposé pour éviter la résolution de l'équation de Poisson durant les itérations du "point fixe". Cette nouvelle façon de résoudre les problèmes IFS a montré des performances prometteuses pour des systèmes en IFS complexe. / In this thesis a novel non-body conforming mesh formulation is developed, called the moving immersed boundary method (MIBM), for the numerical simulation of fluid-structure interaction (FSI). The primary goal is to enable solids of complex shape to move arbitrarily in an incompressible viscous fluid, without fitting the solid boundary motion with dynamic meshes. This novel method enforces the no-slip boundary condition exactly at the fluid-solid interface with a boundary force, without introducing any artificial constants to the rigid body formulation. As a result, large time step can be used in current method. To determine the boundary force more efficiently in case of moving boundaries, an additional moving force equation is derived and the resulting system is solved by the conjugate gradient method. The proposed method is highly portable and can be integrated into any fluid solver as a plug-in. In the present thesis, the MIBM is implemented in the fluid solver based on the projection method. In order to obtain results of high accuracy, the rotational incremental pressure correction projection method is adopted, which is free of numerical boundary layer and is second order accurate. To accelerate the calculation of the pressure Poisson equation, the multi-grid method is employed as a preconditioner together with the conjugate gradient method as a solver. The code is further parallelized on the graphics processing unit (GPU) with the CUDA library to enjoy high performance computing. At last, the proposed MIBM is applied to the study of two-way FSI problem. For stability and modularity reasons, a partitioned implicit scheme is selected for this strongly coupled problem. The interface matching of fluid and solid variables is realized through a fixed point iteration. To reduce the computational cost, a novel efficient coupling scheme is proposed by removing the time-consuming pressure Poisson equation from this fixed point interaction. The proposed method has shown a promising performance in modeling complex FSI system.

Material point method (MPM) is a numerical tool which was originally used for modelling large deformations of solid mechanics problems. Due to the particle based spatial discretiza- tion, MPM is naturally capable of handling large mass movements together with topological changes. Further, the Lagrangian particles in MPM allow an easy implementation of history dependent materials. So far, however, research on MPM has been mostly restricted to explicit dynamic formu- lations with linear approximation functions. This is because of the simplicity and the low computational cost of such explicit algorithms. Particularly in MPM analysis of geomechan- ics problems, a considerable attention is given to the standard explicit formulation to model dynamic large deformations of geomaterials. Nonetheless, several limitations exist. In the limit of incompressibility, a significantly small time step is required to ensure the stability of the explicit formulation. Time step size restriction is also present in low permeability cases in porous media analysis. Spurious pressure oscillations are another numerical instability present in nearly incompressible flow behaviours. This research considers an implicit treatment of the pressure in MPM algorithm to simu- late material incompressibility. The coupled velocity (v)-pressure (p) governing equations are solved by applying Chorin’s projection method which exhibits an inherent pressure stability. Hence, linear finite elements can be used in the MPM solver. The main purpose of this new MPM formulation is to mitigate artificial pressure oscillations and time step restrictions present in the explicit MPM approach. First, a single phase MPM solver is applied to free surface incompressible fluid flow problems. Numerical results show a better approximation of the pressure field compared to the results obtained from the explicit MPM. The proposed formulation is then extended to model fully saturated porous materials with incompress- ible constituents. A solid velocity(v S )-fluid velocity (v F )-pore pressure (p) formulation is presented within the framework of mixture theory. Comparing the numerical results for the one-dimensional consolidation problem shows that the proposed incompressible MPM algorithm provides a stable and accurate pore pressure field even without implementing damping in the solver. Finally, the coupled MPM is used to solve a two-dimensional wave propagation problem and a plain strain consolidation problem. One of the important features of the proposed hydro mechanical coupled MPM formulation is that the time step size is not dependent on the incompressibility and the permeability of the porous medium.

The simulation of physical systems in the early stages of conceptual designs has shown to be a key factor for adequate decision making and avoiding big and expensive issues downstream in engineering projects. In the case of aircraft cabin design, taking into account the thermal comfort of the passengers as well as the proper air circulation and renovation can make this difference. However, current numerical fluid simulations (CFD) are too computationally expensive for integrating them in early design stages where extensive comparative studies have to be performed. Instead, Zonal Models (ZM) appear to be a fast-computation approach that can provide coarse simulations for aircraft cabin flows. In this thesis, a Zonal Model solver is developed as well as a geometry-definition and meshing framework, both in Matlab®, for performing coarse, flexible and computationally cheap flow simulations of user-defined cabin designs. On one hand, this solver consists of a Fractional Step approach for coarse unstructured bi-dimensional meshes. On the other, the cabin geometry can be introduced by hand for simple shapes, but also with Computational Aided Design tools (CAD) for more complex designs. Additionally, it can be chosen to generate the meshes from scratch or morph them from previously generated ones. / <p>The presentation was online</p>