Fluid structure interactions occur to some extent in nearly every type of fluid flow. Understanding how structures interact with fluids and visa-versa is of vital importance in many engineering applications. The purpose of this research is to explore how fluids interact with flexible and rigid structures. A computational model was used to model the fluid structure interactions of vibrating synthetic vocal folds. The model simulated the coupling of the fluid and solid domains using a fluid-structure interface boundary condition. The fluid domain used a slightly compressible flow solver to allow for the possibility of acoustic coupling with the subglottal geometry and vibration of the vocal fold model. As the subglottis lengthened, the frequency of vibration decreased until a new acoustic mode could form in the subglottis. Synthetic aperture particle image velocimetry (SAPIV) is a three-dimensional particle tracking technique. SAPIV was used to image the jet of air that emerges from vibrating human vocal folds (glottal jet) during phonation. The three-dimensional reconstruction of the glottal jet found faint evidence of flow characteristics seen in previous research, such as axis-switching, but did not have sufficient resolution to detect small features. SAPIV was further applied to reconstruct the smaller flow characteristics of the glottal jet of vibrating synthetic vocal folds. Two- and four-layer synthetic vocal fold models were used to determine how the glottal jet from the synthetic models compared to the glottal jet from excised human vocal folds. The two- and four-layer models clearly exhibited axis-switching which has been seen in other 3D analyses of the glottal jet. Cavitation in a quiescent fluid can break a rigid structure such as a glass bottle. A new cavitation number was derived to include acceleration and pressure head at cavitation onset. A cavitation stick was used to validate the cavitation number by filling it with different depths and hitting the stick to cause fluid cavitation. Acceleration was measured using an accelerometer and cavitation bubbles were detected using a high-speed camera. Cavitation in an accelerating fluid occurred at a cavitation number of 1.

We use Darcy's law and conservation of mass to model the flow of a fluid through a porous medium. It is a second order elliptic system with a heterogeneous coefficient. We consider the equations written in mixed form. In the heterogeneous case, we define a new multiscale mortar space that incorporates purely local information from homogenization theory to better approximate the solution along the interfaces with just a few degrees of freedom. In the case of a locally periodic heterogeneous coefficient of period epsilon, we prove that the new method achieves both optimal order error estimates in the discretization parameters and good approximation when epsilon is small. Moreover, we present numerical examples to assess its performance when the coefficient is not obviously locally periodic. We show that the new mortar method works well, and better than polynomial mortar spaces. On the other hand, we also propose to use multiscale mortars as a coarse component to construct a two-level preconditioner for the saddle point linear system arising from the fine scale discretization of the mixed finite element system. The two-level preconditioners are constructed based on the interfaces. We propose a framework to define the interpolation operators for the face based two-level preconditioners for different combination of coarse and fine scale mortar spaces for matching and nonmatching grids. In this dissertation, we show that for quasi-homogeneous problems and matching grids, the condition number of the preconditioned interface operator is bounded by (log(H/h))², which is the same as the traditional two-level preconditioners, for quasi-homogeneous problems. We show several numerical examples to demonstrate that for the strongly heterogeneous porous media, it is often desirable and even necessary to use a higher dimensional coarse mortar space to construct the coarse preconditioner to achieve convergence. We apply our ideas to study slightly compressible single phase and two-phase flow in a porous medium. We find that for the nonlinear single phase problem, the two-level preconditioners could be successfully applied to the symmetrized linear system. For the two-phase problem, using the fine scale, instead of multiscale, velocity solutions from the flow problem can greatly benefit the transport problem. / text

Cette thèse est consacrée à l’analyse mathématique de trois problèmes d’écoulements de fluides viscoélastiques de type Oldroyd. Tout d’abord, nous étudions des écoulements stationnaires faiblement compressibles dans un domaine borné avec des conditions au bord de type "rentrante-sortante". Nous étudions aussi le problème d’écoulements stationnaires faiblement compressibles dans un coin convexe. En utilisant une méthode de point fixe (premier et deuxième problèmes) et une décomposition de Helmoltz (deuxième problème), nous montrons des résultats d’existence et d’unicité des solutions. Nous étudions également le cas d’un écoulement non stationnaire. Nous montrons un résultat d’existence locale et un résultat d’existence globale, avec des conditions initiales suffisamment petites, pour des fluides compressibles. Nous démontrons aussi la convergence du modèle d’écoulement viscoélastique compressible à faible nombre de Mach vers le modèle incompressible lorsque les données initiales sont "bien préparées" / In this PHD thesis, we study three problems for viscoelastic flows of Oldroyd type. First, we study steady flows of slightly compressible in a bounded domain with non-zero velocities on the boundary ; the pressure and the extra-stress tensor are prescribed on the part of the boundary corresponding to entering velocity. This causes a weak singularity in the solution at the junction of incoming and outgoing flows. We also study the problem of steady flows of slightly compressible fluids with zero boundary conditions in a domain with an isolated corner point. Using a method of fixed point (first and second problems) and a Helmoltz decomposition (second problem), we show some results of existence and uniqueness of solutions. In the last part, we study the case of a non-steady flow : we show some results of local and of global existence, with sufficiently small initial data, for compressible flows. The zero-Mach number limit is also established