Conservation in Load and Displacement Transfer Methods for Fluid–Structure Interaction

  • Kamakura, Keisuke (Tohoku University)
  • Abe, Yoshiaki (Tohoku University)

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In fluid–structure interaction (FSI) analysis, load and displacement transfer methods that exchange physical quantities between fluid and structural meshes play a crucial role in ensuring computational accuracy and numerical stability. Inappropriate transfer procedures may lead to violations of conservation laws related to force and energy, resulting in a degradation of the overall accuracy and numerical stability of coupled analyses. In this study, we propose the load and displacement transfer method that improves transfer accuracy while preserving the total load, moment, and work between the fluid and structure. In the proposed method, a basic transfer matrix is first constructed using Radial Basis Function (RBF) interpolation based on the correspondence between the fluid and structural meshes. The target structure is then divided into multiple regions, and small-scale transfer matrices are constructed for each region. These matrices are subsequently assembled to improve computational efficiency and numerical stability. Next, stepwise conservation corrections are applied to the constructed transfer matrices. First, a correction is introduced to preserve the total load, followed by a correction to ensure conservation of the total moment. Finally, a correction is applied to preserve the total work, resulting in load and displacement transfer matrices that satisfy physical consistency. Although the displacement transfer matrix and the load transfer matrix are defined independently, both are designed to simultaneously satisfy the conservation conditions of force, moment, and work, which constitutes a key feature of the proposed method. Through simple transfer tests, it is demonstrated that the proposed method achieves highly accurate displacement transfer from the structure to the fluid and load transfer from the fluid to the structure. In particular, a significant improvement in transfer accuracy compared with conventional methods is confirmed even when there is a large difference in mesh resolution between the fluid and structural domains. The proposed load and displacement transfer method provides a versatile and robust data exchange framework that achieves both conservation and high transfer accuracy. It is shown that the method enables stable and accurate FSI analyses using non-matching meshes and is expected to contribute to the advancement of large-scale and practical FSI simulations, including aeroelastic and multiphysics analyses.