An Integrated OpenFOAM Membrane Fluid-Structure Interaction Solver

Abstract

The scope of this paper is to present the design and verification of an integrated OpenFOAM membrane fluid-structure interaction (FSI) solver for small deflections, which employs the finite volume method (FVM) for solving the flow field and the finite area method (FAM) for solution of the membrane deflection. A key feature is that both the fluid and the solid solver operate on a common mesh geometry and are included into a single executable. Although the scope of applicability is narrow due to limitations of the membrane solver at its current state, positive verification results prove the practicability of the design, which allows for lightweight implementation as well as simple data transfers and post-processing.

OpenFOAM-preCICE: Coupling OpenFOAM with External Solvers for Multi-Physics Simulations

“…For FSI, prominent examples are the foam-extend packages fsiFoam [16] (studied e.g., by Luofeng et al [17]) and solids4foam [18] (used, e.g., by Oliveira et al [19]), as well as the training code simpleFsi [20]. The same approach is also followed by Wagner et al [21] to extend OpenFOAM to FSI of 2D membranes. The main advantage of an internal coupling is simply that everything is integrated within OpenFOAM: An experienced OpenFOAM user does not need to learn any new tool.…”

“…Since OpenFOAM does not include a heat-equation solver which can handle non-zero right-hand side values, we extended the laplacianFoam solver for this coupling scenario, which we use on both sides 21 . For setting the boundary values on Γ D , we use groovyBC, part of swak4Foam 22 .…”