Unified Solver for Modeling and Simulation of Nonlinear Aeroelasticity and Fluid-Structure Interactions

Abstract

In this work, Material Point Method (MPM) is extended and enhanced to solve both fluid and structural dynamics, leading to an innovative unified solver for modeling and simulation of nonlinear aeroelasticity and fluid-structure interactions. In this approach, the fluid and structure are discretized into material points, and a unified solver is used to solve both fluid and structural dynamics, but with different EOS. The fluid-structure interactions are modeled by momentum exchange at the interface via the computational background grid. To eliminate the numerical oscillations that are typically encountered by particle-based methods, a minmod-type slope limiter is adopted. The distortion of the material point distribution is solved by regularization. Adaptive multi-level mesh refinement algorithm is developed to capture the multi-scale physics such as shock waves as well as large and small eddies. To speed-up the calculation, parallelization is implemented. Several cases are presented to illustrate the potential of this methodology for modeling and simulation of nonlinear aeroelastcity and fluid-structure interactions.