SEMINAR

DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL AND CIVIL ENGINEERING

Over-coming Fluid-structure Instabilities for Incompressible Flows and Light Bodies

Prof. Bill Henshaw
Dept. of Mathematical Sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Abstract

The added-mass instability has, for decades, plagued partitioned fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations of incompressible flows coupled to light solids and structures. Many current approaches require tens or hundreds of expensive sub-iterations per time-step. In this talk some new stable partitioned algorithms are described for coupling incompressible flows with (1) compressible elastic bulk solids, (2) thin structural beams and (3) rigid bodies. These added-mass partitioned (AMP) schemes require no sub-iterations, can be made fully second- or higher-order accurate, and remain stable even in the presence of strong added-mass effects. These schemes are implemented using moving and deforming overlapping grids with the Overture framework.

Biography

Dr. Henshaw is the Margaret A. Darrin Distinguished Professor in Applied Mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  He earned his B.Math. from the University of Waterloo and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Professor Heinz-Otto Kreiss.  Dr. Henshaw has worked at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  His research interests lie in area of the numerical solution of partial differential equations and in techniques for overlapping grids.  He has worked on the development of stable and accurate algorithms and boundary conditions for the solution of PDEs on overlapping grids including development of adaptive mesh refinement methods, multigrid algorithms, grid generation algorithms, moving grid techniques, multi-domain methods for conjugate heat transfer and fluid structure interactions as well as high-order accurate methods for incompressible flows and Maxwell's equations.  Dr. Henshaw is the primary developer of Overture, an object oriented framework for the solution of PDEs on overlapping grids, www.overtureFramework.org.