An efficient semi-implicit immersed boundary method for the Navier-Stokes equations (Q950394)

The immersed boundary method is one of the most useful computational methods in studying fluid-structure interaction. However, this method is known to require small time steps to maintain stability when solved with an explicit method. Many implicit or approximately implicit methods have been proposed in the literature to remove this severe time-step stability constraint, but none of them gives satisfactory performance. In this paper, the authors propose an efficient semi-implicit scheme to remove this stiffness from the immersed boundary method for Navier-Stokes equations. The construction of this semi-implicit scheme consists of two steps. First, a semi-implicit discretization which is proved to be unconditionally stable, is obtained. This unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme is still quite expensive to be implemented in practice. Next, the authors apply the small scale decomposition to the unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme to construct an efficient semi-implicit scheme. Unlike other implicit or semi-implicit schemes proposed in the literature, this semi-implicit scheme can be solved explicitly in the spectral space. Thus the computational cost of authors' semi-implicit schemes is comparable to that of an explicit scheme. Extensive numerical experiments show that the present semi-implicit scheme has much better stability property than an explicit scheme. This offers a substantial computational saving in using the immersed boundary method