A high-efficiency discretized immersed boundary method for moving boundaries in incompressible flows.

The Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) has an advantage in simulating fluid-structure interaction, owning to its simplicity, intuitiveness, and ease of handling complex object boundaries. The interpolation function plays a vital role in IBM and it is usually computationally intensive. For moving or deforming solids, the interpolation weights of all the immersed boundary points ought to be updated every time step, which takes quite a lot CPU time. Since the interpolation procedure within all uniform structured grids is highly repetitive and very similar, we propose a simple and generalized Discretized Immersed Boundary Method (DIBM), which significantly improves efficiency by discretizing the interpolation functions onto subgrid points within each control volume and reusing a predefined universal interpolation stencil. The accuracy and performance of DIBM are analyzed using both theoretical estimation and simulation tests. The results show speedup ratios of 30-40 or even higher using DIBM when compared with conventional IBM for typical moving boundary simulations like particle-laden flows, while the error is estimated to be under 1% and can be further decreased by using finer subgrid stencils. By balancing the performance and accuracy demands, DIBM provides an efficient alternative framework for handling moving boundaries in incompressible viscous flows.

An Investigation on the Aggregation and Rheodynamics of Human Red Blood Cells Using High Performance Computations.

Studies on the haemodynamics of human circulation are clinically and scientifically important. In order to investigate the effect of deformation and aggregation of red blood cells (RBCs) in blood flow, a computational technique has been developed by coupling the interaction between the fluid and the deformable RBCs. Parallelization was carried out for the coupled code and a high speedup was achieved based on a spatial decomposition. In order to verify the code's capability of simulating RBC deformation and transport, simulations were carried out for a spherical capsule in a microchannel and multiple RBC transport in a Poiseuille flow. RBC transport in a confined tube was also carried out to simulate the peristaltic effects of microvessels. Relatively large-scale simulations were carried out of the motion of 49,512 RBCs in shear flows, which yielded a hematocrit of 45%. The large-scale feature of the simulation has enabled a macroscale verification and investigation of the overall characteristics of RBC aggregations to be carried out. The results are in excellent agreement with experimental studies and, more specifically, both the experimental and simulation results show uniform RBC distributions under high shear rates (60-100/s) whereas large aggregations were observed under a lower shear rate of 10/s.

Saltation of particles in turbulent channel flow.

This paper numerically investigates particle saltation in a turbulent channel flow having a rough bed consisting of two to three layers of densely packed spheres. The Shields function is 0.065 which is just above the sediment entrainment threshold to give a bed-load regime. The applied methodology is a combination of three technologies, i.e., the direct numerical simulation of turbulent flow; the combined finite-discrete element modeling of the deformation, movement, and collision of the particles; and the immersed boundary method for the fluid-solid interaction. It is shown that the presence of entrained particles significantly modifies the flow profiles of velocity, turbulent intensities, and shear stresses in the vicinity of a rough bed. The quasi-streamwise-aligned streaky structures are not observed in the near-wall region and the particles scatter on the rough bed owing to their large size. However, in the outer flow region, the turbulent coherent structures recover due to the weakening rough-bed effects and particle interferences. First- and second-order statistical features of particle translational and angular velocities, together with sediment concentration and volumetric flux density profiles, are presented. Several key parameters of the particle saltation trajectory are calculated and agree closely with published experimental data. Time histories of the hydrodynamic forces exerted upon a typical saltating particle, together with those of the particle's coordinates and velocities, are presented. A strong correlation is shown between the abruptly decreasing streamwise velocity and increasing vertical velocity at collision which indicates that the continuous saltation of large-grain-size particles is controlled by collision parameters such as particle incident angle, local bed packing arrangement, and particle density, etc.

Large scale simulation of red blood cell aggregation in shear flows.

Aggregation of highly deformable red blood cells (RBCs) significantly affects the blood flow in the human circulatory system. To investigate the effect of deformation and aggregation of RBCs in blood flow, a mathematical model has been established by coupling the interaction between the fluid and the deformable solids. The model includes a three-dimensional finite volume method solver for incompressible viscous flows, the combined finite-discrete element method for computing the deformation of the RBCs, a JKR model-Johnson, Kendall and Roberts (1964-1971) (Johnson et al., 1971) to take account of the adhesion forces between different RBCs and an iterative direct-forcing immersed boundary method to couple the fluid-solid interactions. The flow of 49,512 RBCs at 45% concentration under the influence of aggregating forces was examined, improving the existing knowledge on simulating flow and structural characteristics of blood at a large scale: previous studies on the particular issue were restricted to simulating the flow of 13,000 aggregative ellipsoidal particles at a 10% concentration. The results are in excellent agreement with experimental studies. More specifically, both the experimental and the simulation results show uniform RBC distributions under high shear rates (60-100/s) whereas large aggregation structures were observed under a lower shear rate of 10/s. The statistical analysis of the simulation data also shows that the shear rate has significant influence on both the flow velocity profiles and the frequency distribution of the RBC orientation angles.