A consistent approach for fluid-structure-contact interaction based on a porous flow model for rough surface contact

Simulation approaches for fluid-structure-contact interaction, especially if requested to be consistent even down to the real contact scenarios, belong to the most challenging and still unsolved problems in computational mechanics. The main challenges are twofold - one is to have a correct physical model for this scenario, and the other one is to have a numerical method that is capable of working and being consistent down to a zero gap. And when analyzing such challenging setups of fluid-structure interaction that include contact of submersed solid components it gets obvious that the influence of surface roughness effects is essential for a physical consistent modeling of such configurations. To capture this system behavior, we present a continuum mechanical model which is able to include the effects of the surface microstructure in a fluid-structure-contact interaction framework. An averaged representation for the mixture of fluid and solid on the rough surfaces, which is of major interest for the macroscopic response of such a system, is introduced therein. The inherent coupling of the macroscopic fluid flow and the flow inside the rough surfaces, the stress exchange of all contacting solid bodies involved, and the interaction between fluid and solid is included in the construction of the model. Although the physical model is not restricted to finite element based methods, a numerical approach with its core based on the Cut Finite Element Method (CutFEM), enabling topological changes of the fluid domain to solve the presented model numerically, is introduced. Such a CutFEM based approach is able to deal with the numerical challenges mentioned above. Different test cases give a perspective towards the potential capabilities of the presented physical model and numerical approach.Comment: 33 pages, 23 figure

An overlapping decomposition framework for wave propagation in heterogeneous and unbounded media: Formulation, analysis, algorithm, and simulation

A natural medium for wave propagation comprises a coupled bounded heterogeneous region and an unbounded homogeneous free-space. Frequency-domain wave propagation models in the medium, such as the variable coefficient Helmholtz equation, include a faraway decay radiation condition (RC). It is desirable to develop algorithms that incorporate the full physics of the heterogeneous and unbounded medium wave propagation model, and avoid an approximation of the RC. In this work we first present and analyze an overlapping decomposition framework that is equivalent to the full-space heterogeneous-homogenous continuous model, governed by the Helmholtz equation with a spatially dependent refractive index and the RC. Our novel overlapping framework allows the user to choose two free boundaries, and gain the advantage of applying established high-order finite and boundary element methods (FEM and BEM) to simulate an equivalent coupled model. The coupled model comprises auxiliary interior bounded heterogeneous and exterior unbounded homogeneous Helmholtz problems. A smooth boundary can be chosen for simulating the exterior problem using a spectrally accurate BEM, and a simple boundary can be used to setup a high-order FEM for the interior problem. Thanks to the spectral accuracy of the exterior computational model, the resulting coupled system in the overlapping region is relatively very small. Using the decomposed equivalent framework, we develop a novel overlapping FEM-BEM algorithm for simulating the acoustic or electromagnetic wave propagation in two dimensions. Our FEM-BEM algorithm for the full-space model incorporates the RC exactly. Numerical experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the FEM-BEM approach for simulating smooth and non-smooth wave fields, with the latter induced by a complex heterogeneous medium and a discontinuous refractive index.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, 4 table

An inverse problem formulation of the immersed boundary method

We formulate the immersed-boundary method (IBM) as an inverse problem. A control variable is introduced on the boundary of a larger domain that encompasses the target domain. The optimal control is the one that minimizes the mismatch between the state and the desired boundary value along the immersed target-domain boundary. We begin by investigating a na\"ive problem formulation that we show is ill-posed: in the case of the Laplace equation, we prove that the solution is unique but it fails to depend continuously on the data; for the linear advection equation, even solution uniqueness fails to hold. These issues are addressed by two complimentary strategies. The first strategy is to ensure that the enclosing domain tends to the true domain as the mesh is refined. The second strategy is to include a specialized parameter-free regularization that is based on penalizing the difference between the control and the state on the boundary. The proposed inverse IBM is applied to the diffusion, advection, and advection-diffusion equations using a high-order discontinuous Galerkin discretization. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the regularized scheme achieves optimal rates of convergence and that the reduced Hessian of the optimization problem has a bounded condition number as the mesh is refined

Spectral method for matching exterior and interior elliptic problems

A spectral method is described for solving coupled elliptic problems on an interior and an exterior domain. The method is formulated and tested on the two-dimensional interior Poisson and exterior Laplace problems, whose solutions and their normal derivatives are required to be continuous across the interface. A complete basis of homogeneous solutions for the interior and exterior regions, corresponding to all possible Dirichlet boundary values at the interface, are calculated in a preprocessing step. This basis is used to construct the influence matrix which serves to transform the coupled boundary conditions into conditions on the interior problem. Chebyshev approximations are used to represent both the interior solutions and the boundary values. A standard Chebyshev spectral method is used to calculate the interior solutions. The exterior harmonic solutions are calculated as the convolution of the free-space Green's function with a surface density; this surface density is itself the solution to an integral equation which has an analytic solution when the boundary values are given as a Chebyshev expansion. Properties of Chebyshev approximations insure that the basis of exterior harmonic functions represents the external near-boundary solutions uniformly. The method is tested by calculating the electrostatic potential resulting from charge distributions in a rectangle. The resulting influence matrix is well-conditioned and solutions converge exponentially as the resolution is increased. The generalization of this approach to three-dimensional problems is discussed, in particular the magnetohydrodynamic equations in a finite cylindrical domain surrounded by a vacuum

An Operator-Based Local Discontinuous Galerkin Method Compatible With the BSSN Formulation of the Einstein Equations

Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element (DGFE) methods offer a mathematically beautiful, computationally efficient, and efficiently parallelizable way to solve hyperbolic partial differential equations. These properties make them highly desirable for numerical calculations in relativistic astrophysics and many other fields. The BSSN formulation of the Einstein equations has repeatedly demonstrated its robustness. The formulation is not only stable but allows for puncture-type evolutions of black hole systems. To-date no one has been able to solve the full (3+1)-dimensional BSSN equations using DGFE methods. This is partly because DGFE discretization often occurs at the level of the equations, not the derivative operator, and partly because DGFE methods are traditionally formulated for manifestly flux-conservative systems. By discretizing the derivative operator, we generalize a particular flavor of DGFE methods, Local DG methods, to solve arbitrary second-order hyperbolic equations. Because we discretize at the level of the derivative operator, our method can be interpreted as either a DGFE method or as a finite differences stencil with non-constant coefficients.Comment: Incorporated referee comments during peer-review. Added several references pointed out to us. Added a figure and discussion comparing pointwise error for 4th- and 5th-order stencils for wave equatio

A Nystr\"om-based finite element method on polygonal elements

We consider families of finite elements on polygonal meshes, that are defined implicitly on each mesh cell as solutions of local Poisson problems with polynomial data. Functions in the local space on each mesh cell are evaluated via Nystr\"om discretizations of associated integral equations, allowing for curvilinear polygons and non-polynomial boundary data. Several experiments demonstrate the approximation quality of interpolated functions in these spaces

Spectral Methods for Partial Differential Equations in Irregular Domains: The Spectral Smoothed Boundary Method

In this paper, we propose a numerical method to approximate the solution of partial differential equations in irregular domains with no-flux boundary conditions by means of spectral methods. The main features of this method are its capability to deal with domains of arbitrary shape and its easy implementation via Fast Fourier Transform routines. We discuss several examples of practical interest and test the results against exact solutions and standard numerical methods.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figure

The topology of Helmholtz domains

The goal of this paper is to describe and clarify as much as possible the 3-dimensional topology underlying the Helmholtz cuts method, which occurs in a wide theoretic and applied literature about Electromagnetism, Fluid dynamics and Elasticity on domains of the ordinary space. We consider two classes of bounded domains that satisfy mild boundary conditions and that become "simple" after a finite number of disjoint cuts along properly embedded surfaces. For the first class (Helmholtz), "simple" means that every curl-free smooth vector field admits a potential. For the second (weakly-Helmholtz), we only require that a potential exists for the restriction of every curl-free smooth vector field defined on the whole initial domain. By means of classical and rather elementary facts of 3-dimensional geometric and algebraic topology, we give an exhaustive description of Helmholtz domains, realizing that their topology is forced to be quite elementary (in particular, Helmholtz domains with connected boundary are just possibly knotted handlebodies, and the complement of any non-trivial link is not Helmholtz). The discussion about weakly-Helmholtz domains is a bit more advanced, and their classification appears to be a quite difficult issue. Nevertheless, we provide several interesting characterizations of them and, in particular, we point out that the class of links with weakly-Helmholtz complements eventually coincides with the class of the so-called homology boundary links, that have been widely studied in Knot Theory.Comment: 39 pages, 14 figure

Fluid-structure interaction with H(div)H(\text{div})-conforming finite elements

In this paper a novel application of the (high-order) $H(\text{div})$-conforming Hybrid Discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for monolithic fluid-structure interaction (FSI) is presented. The Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) description is derived for $H(\text{div})$-conforming finite elements including the Piola transformation, yielding exact divergence free fluid velocity solutions. The arising method is demonstrated by means of the benchmark problems proposed by Turek and Hron [50]. With hp-refinement strategies singularities and boundary layers are overcome leading to optimal spatial convergence rates

Unstable Spiral Waves and Local Euclidean Symmetry in a Model of Cardiac Tissue

This paper investigates the properties of unstable single-spiral wave solutions arising in the Karma model of two-dimensional cardiac tissue. In particular, we discuss how such solutions can be computed numerically on domains of arbitrary shape and study how their stability, rotational frequency, and spatial drift depend on the size of the domain as well as the position of the spiral core with respect to the boundaries. We also discuss how the breaking of local Euclidean symmetry due to finite size effects as well as the spatial discretization of the model is reflected in the structure and dynamics of spiral waves. This analysis allows identification of a self-sustaining process responsible for maintaining the state of spiral chaos featuring multiple interacting spirals.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figure