MESH UPDATE STRATEGIES IN PARALLEL FINITE-ELEMENT COMPUTATIONS OF FLOW PROBLEMS WITH MOVING BOUNDARIES AND INTERFACES

We present strategies to update the mesh as the spatial domain changes its shape in computations of how problems with moving boundaries and interfaces. These strategies are used in conjunction with the stabiliz ed space-time finite element formulations introduced earlier for compu tation of flow problems with free surfaces, two-liquid interfaces, mov ing mechanical components, and fluid-structure and fluid-particle inte ractions. In these mesh update strategies, based on the special and au tomatic mesh moving schemes, the frequency of remeshing is minimized t o reduce the projection errors and to minimize the cost associated wit h mesh generation and parallelization set-up. These costs could otherw ise become overwhelming in 3D problems. We present several examples of these mesh update strategies being used in massively parallel computa tion of incompressible flow problems.