AN ARBITRARY LAGRANGIAN-EULERIAN FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD

This paper describes an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) finite ele ment method for the simulation of fluid domains with moving structures . The fluid is viscous, incompressible and unsteady and the fluid moti on is solved by a fractional step discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations. The emphasis is on convection dominated flows, and a three- step method is used for the convection term. The moving structure caus es the mesh of the fluid domain to move, and a new algorithm is propos ed to solve the important and crucial problem of the calculation of th e mesh velocities. Numerical calculations of the added mass and added damping of a vibrating two-dimensional circular cylinder in the freque ncy Reynolds number range Re-w = 20-2000 are performed to evaluate the proposed ALE finite element method. The numerically calculated added mass and added damping are compared to both analytical and numerical r esults. To further demonstrate the generality of the method, a numeric al simulation of flow past an oscillating schematic sports car is pres ented.