Fluid-structure interaction with large structural displacements (Q5935685)

Calculations of viscous flows inside deformable structures can meet with difficulties when imposing kinematic compatibility conditions at the fluid-structure interface and updating the geometry of domain. Here the authors propose how to overcome these problems by considering fluid and structure as a common continuous medium in a fixed reference configuration. Then the resulting problem is split into a fluid and a structural part through an additive decomposition of the space of kinematically admissible test functions. The approach treats the structure in a fully Lagrangian way, and an associated arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation is applied to the fluid. The method has been implemented into an industrial CFD code, and some results on the simulation of industrial hydraulic shock absorbers are presented at the end of the paper.