Projects and Grants per year
Grants and Contracts Details
Description
The objective of the proposed research is to enhance NASA's
simulation capabilities for fluid-structure interaction problems
involving large structural deformations. This research is
important to various NASA relevant applications, such as Mars'
entry parachute, flutter, and fuel tank sloshing simulations.
Simulating flows involving moving and deforming boundaries on
body-fitted meshes requires a procedure to deform the mesh and a
method to project the solution onto the new mesh at each update.
For simulating fluid-structure interaction problems involving
large deformations the body-fitted mesh approach has severe
shortcomings, such as dealing with topology changes, the
computational cost of re-generating the computational mesh, and
conservative projection of the solution. For this reason, in
this research project the coupling of a higher-order immersed
boundary method with a geometrically non-linear finite element
solver is proposed. The immersed boundary method provides a
convenient way of including the body motion and deformations by
using a stationary non-deforming Cartesian grid. One of the key
advantages of immersed boundary methods is that the volume mesh
generation process can be fully automated. Furthermore, this
approach can handle large deformations of the geometry in a
straightforward fashion. Nevertheless, in this research there
are some inherent numerical challenges that need to be
addressed: (1) identify an efficient coupling strategy between
the fluid and structural solvers for large deformations, (2)
improve structural finite element solver capabilities to account
for geometric nonlinearities, and (3) improve conservation
properties of immersed boundary method for moving boundary
problems with large deformations. All proposed methods are
developed and tested inside an in-house CFD framework developed
at the University of Kentucky. The newly developed methods will
be implemented in different modules in such a way that they can
be easily utilized within the Launch Ascent and Vehicle
Aerodynamics framework developed by our collaborators at NASA
Ames Research Center.
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 6/1/17 → 8/31/18 |
Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Fingerprint
Explore the research topics touched on by this project. These labels are generated based on the underlying awards/grants. Together they form a unique fingerprint.
Projects
- 1 Finished
-
NASA EPSCoR: Research Infrastructure Development (RID) 2016-2018
Smith, S. (PI)
6/1/15 → 5/31/19
Project: Research project