A simple direct-forcing immersed boundary projection method with prediction-correction for fluid-solid interaction problems

In this paper, we propose a simple and novel direct-forcing immersed boundary (IB) projection method in conjunction with a prediction-correction (PC) process for simulating the dynamics of fluid-solid interaction problems, in which each immersed solid object can be stationary or moving in the fluid with a prescribed velocity. The method is mainly based on the introduction of a virtual force which is distributed only on the immersed solid bodies and appended to the fluid momentum equations to accommodate the internal boundary conditions at the immersed solid boundaries. More specifically, we first predict the virtual force on the immersed solid domain by using the difference between the prescribed solid velocity and the computed velocity, which is obtained by applying the Choi–Moin projection scheme to the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations on the entire domain including the portion occupied by the solid bodies. The predicted virtual force is then added to the fluid momentum equations as an additional forcing term and we employ the same projection scheme again to correct the velocity field, pressure and virtual force. Although this method is a two-stage approach, the computational cost of the correction stage is rather cheap, since the associated discrete linear systems need to be solved in the correction stage are same with that in the prediction stage, except the right-hand side data terms. Such a PC procedure can be iterated to form a more general method, if necessary. The current two-stage direct-forcing IB projection method has the advantage over traditional one-stage direct-forcing IB projection methods, consisting of the prediction step only, by allowing much larger time step, since traditional methods generally request quite small time step for flow field relaxed and adjusted to the solid body movement even using implicit scheme. Numerical experiments of several benchmark problems are performed to illustrate the simplicity and efficient performance of the newly proposed method. Convergence tests show that the accuracy of the velocity field is super-linear in space in all the 1-norm, 2-norm, and maximum norm. We also find that our numerical results are in very good agreement with the previous works in the literature and one correction at each time step appears to be good enough for the proposed PC procedure.