A fast immersed boundary method for external incompressible viscous flows using lattice Green's functions

A new parallel, computationally efficient immersed boundary method for solving three-dimensional, viscous, incompressible flows on unbounded domains is presented. Immersed surfaces with prescribed motions are generated using the interpolation and regularization operators obtained from the discrete delta function approach of the original (Peskin's) immersed boundary method. Unlike Peskin's method, boundary forces are regarded as Lagrange multipliers that are used to satisfy the no-slip condition. The incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are discretized on an unbounded staggered Cartesian grid and are solved in a finite number of operations using lattice Green's function techniques. These techniques are used to automatically enforce the natural free-space boundary conditions and to implement a novel block-wise adaptive grid that significantly reduces the run-time cost of solutions by limiting operations to grid cells in the immediate vicinity and near-wake region of the immersed surface. These techniques also enable the construction of practical discrete viscous integrating factors that are used in combination with specialized half-explicit Runge-Kutta schemes to accurately and efficiently solve the differential algebraic equations describing the discrete momentum equation, incompressibility constraint, and no-slip constraint. Linear systems of equations resulting from the time integration scheme are efficiently solved using an approximation-free nested projection technique. The algebraic properties of the discrete operators are used to reduce projection steps to simple discrete elliptic problems, e.g. discrete Poisson problems, that are compatible with recent parallel fast multipole methods for difference equations. Numerical experiments on low-aspect-ratio flat plates and spheres at Reynolds numbers up to 3,700 are used to verify the accuracy and physical fidelity of the formulation.Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures; preprint submitted to Journal of Computational Physic

Shock-induced collapse of a gas bubble in shockwave lithotripsy

The shock-induced collapse of a pre-existing nucleus near a solid surface in the focal region of a lithotripter is investigated. The entire flow field of the collapse of a single gas bubble subjected to a lithotripter pulse is simulated using a high-order accurate shock- and interface-capturing scheme, and the wall pressure is considered as an indication of potential damage. Results from the computations show the same qualitative behavior as that observed in experiments: a re-entrant jet forms in the direction of propagation of the pulse and penetrates the bubble during collapse, ultimately hitting the distal side and generating a water-hammer shock. As a result of the propagation of this wave, wall pressures on the order of 1 GPa may be achieved for bubbles collapsing close to the wall. The wall pressure decreases with initial stand-off distance and pulse width and increases with pulse amplitude. For the stand-off distances considered in the present work, the wall pressure due to bubble collapse is larger than that due to the incoming shockwave; the region over which this holds may extend to ten initial radii. The present results indicate that shock-induced collapse is a mechanism with high potential for damage in shockwave lithotripsy

Three-dimensional flows around low-aspect-ratio flat-plate wings at low Reynolds numbers

Three-dimensional flows over impulsively translated low-aspect-ratio flat plates are investigated for Reynolds numbers of 300 and 500, with a focus on the unsteady vortex dynamics at post-stall angles of attack. Numerical simulations, validated by an oil tow-tank experiment, are performed to study the influence of aspect ratio, angle of attack and planform geometry on the wake vortices and the resulting forces on the plate. Immediately following the impulsive start, the separated flows create wake vortices that share the same topology for all aspect ratios. At large time, the tip vortices significantly influence the vortex dynamics and the corresponding forces on the wings. Depending on the aspect ratio, angle of attack and Reynolds number, the flow at large time reaches a stable steady state, a periodic cycle or aperiodic shedding. For cases of high angles of attack, an asymmetric wake develops in the spanwise direction at large time. The present results are compared to higher Reynolds number flows. Some non-rectangular planforms are also considered to examine the difference in the wakes and forces. After the impulsive start, the time at which maximum lift occurs is fairly constant for a wide range of flow conditions during the initial transient. Due to the influence of the tip vortices, the three-dimensional dynamics of the wake vortices are found to be quite different from the two-dimensional von Kármán vortex street in terms of stability and shedding frequency

Numerical simulations of non-spherical bubble collapse

A high-order accurate shock- and interface-capturing scheme is used to simulate the collapse of a gas bubble in water. In order to better understand the damage caused by collapsing bubbles, the dynamics of the shock-induced and Rayleigh collapse of a bubble near a planar rigid surface and in a free field are analysed. Collapse times, bubble displacements, interfacial velocities and surface pressures are quantified as a function of the pressure ratio driving the collapse and of the initial bubble stand-off distance from the wall; these quantities are compared to the available theory and experiments and show good agreement with the data for both the bubble dynamics and the propagation of the shock emitted upon the collapse. Non-spherical collapse involves the formation of a re-entrant jet directed towards the wall or in the direction of propagation of the incoming shock. In shock-induced collapse, very high jet velocities can be achieved, and the finite time for shock propagation through the bubble may be non-negligible compared to the collapse time for the pressure ratios of interest. Several types of shock waves are generated during the collapse, including precursor and water-hammer shocks that arise from the re-entrant jet formation and its impact upon the distal side of the bubble, respectively. The water-hammer shock can generate very high pressures on the wall, far exceeding those from the incident shock. The potential damage to the neighbouring surface is quantified by measuring the wall pressure. The range of stand-off distances and the surface area for which amplification of the incident shock due to bubble collapse occurs is determined

Modal decomposition of fluid-structure interaction with application to flag flapping

Modal decompositions such as proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) and their variants are regularly used to educe physical mechanisms of nonlinear flow phenomena that cannot be easily understood through direct inspection. In fluid-structure interaction (FSI) systems, fluid motion is coupled to vibration and/or deformation of an immersed structure. Despite this coupling, data analysis is often performed using only fluid or structure variables, rather than incorporating both. This approach does not provide information about the manner in which fluid and structure modes are correlated. We present a framework for performing POD and DMD where the fluid and structure are treated together. As part of this framework, we introduce a physically meaningful norm for FSI systems. We first use this combined fluid-structure formulation to identify correlated flow features and structural motions in limit-cycle flag flapping. We then investigate the transition from limit-cycle flapping to chaotic flapping, which can be initiated by increasing the flag mass. Our modal decomposition reveals that at the onset of chaos, the dominant flapping motion increases in amplitude and leads to a bluff-body wake instability. This new bluff-body mode interacts triadically with the dominant flapping motion to produce flapping at the non-integer harmonic frequencies previously reported by Connell & Yue (2007). While our formulation is presented for POD and DMD, there are natural extensions to other data-analysis techniques

Instability waves in a subsonic round jet detected using a near-field phased microphone array

We propose a diagnostic technique to detect instability waves in a subsonic round jet using a phased microphone array. The detection algorithm is analogous to the beam-forming technique, which is typically used with a far-field microphone array to localize noise sources. By replacing the reference solutions used in the conventional beam-forming with eigenfunctions from linear stability analysis, the amplitudes of instability waves in the axisymmetric and first two azimuthal modes are inferred. Experimental measurements with particle image velocimetry and a database from direct numerical simulation are incorporated to design a conical array that is placed just outside the mixing layer near the nozzle exit. The proposed diagnostic technique is tested in experiments by checking for consistency of the radial decay, streamwise evolution and phase correlation of hydrodynamic pressure. The results demonstrate that in a statistical sense, the pressure field is consistent with instability waves evolving in the turbulent mean flow from the nozzle exit to the end of the potential core, particularly near the most amplified frequency of each azimuthal mode. We apply this technique to study the effects of jet Mach number and temperature ratio on the azimuthal mode balance and evolution of instability waves. We also compare the results from the beam-forming algorithm with the proper orthogonal decomposition and discuss some implications for jet noise

Eulerian-Lagrangian method for simulation of cloud cavitation

We present a coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian method to simulate cloud cavitation in a compressible liquid. The method is designed to capture the strong, volumetric oscillations of each bubble and the bubble-scattered acoustics. The dynamics of the bubbly mixture is formulated using volume-averaged equations of motion. The continuous phase is discretized on an Eulerian grid and integrated using a high-order, finite-volume weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme, while the gas phase is modeled as spherical, Lagrangian point-bubbles at the sub-grid scale, each of whose radial evolution is tracked by solving the Keller-Miksis equation. The volume of bubbles is mapped onto the Eulerian grid as the void fraction by using a regularization (smearing) kernel. In the most general case, where the bubble distribution is arbitrary, three-dimensional Cartesian grids are used for spatial discretization. In order to reduce the computational cost for problems possessing translational or rotational homogeneities, we spatially average the governing equations along the direction of symmetry and discretize the continuous phase on two-dimensional or axi-symmetric grids, respectively. We specify a regularization kernel that maps the three-dimensional distribution of bubbles onto the field of an averaged two-dimensional or axi-symmetric void fraction. A closure is developed to model the pressure fluctuations at the sub-grid scale as synthetic noise. For the examples considered here, modeling the sub-grid pressure fluctuations as white noise agrees a priori with computed distributions from three-dimensional simulations, and suffices, a posteriori, to accurately reproduce the statistics of the bubble dynamics. The numerical method and its verification are described by considering test cases of the dynamics of a single bubble and cloud cavitaiton induced by ultrasound fields.Comment: 28 pages, 16 figure

Enhancement of shock-capturing methods via machine learning

In recent years, machine learning has been used to create data-driven solutions to problems for which an algorithmic solution is intractable, as well as fine-tuning existing algorithms. This research applies machine learning to the development of an improved finite-volume method for simulating PDEs with discontinuous solutions. Shock-capturing methods make use of nonlinear switching functions that are not guaranteed to be optimal. Because data can be used to learn nonlinear relationships, we train a neural network to improve the results of a fifth-order WENO method. We post-process the outputs of the neural network to guarantee that the method is consistent. The training data consist of the exact mapping between cell averages and interpolated values for a set of integrable functions that represent waveforms we would expect to see while simulating a PDE. We demonstrate our method on linear advection of a discontinuous function, the inviscid Burgers’ equation, and the 1-D Euler equations. For the latter, we examine the Shu–Osher model problem for turbulence–shock wave interactions. We find that our method outperforms WENO in simulations where the numerical solution becomes overly diffused due to numerical viscosity

Numerical study of the collapse of a bubble subjected to a lithotripter pulse

The collapse of a bubble subjected to a lithotripter pulse is studied numerically. The goal is to record the pressure exerted along the stone, as a measure of potential stone damage. It is found that the pressure due to buble collapse is much larger than that of the lithotripter pulse. Furthermore, the pressure greatly depends on the geometry of the problem (initial stand-off distance and bubble size) and on the properties of the pulse (amplitude and width)