Interaction of complex fluids and solids: theory, algorithms and application to phase-change-driven implosion

There is a large body of literature dealing with the interaction of solids and classical fluids, but the mechanical coupling of solids and complex fluids remains practically unexplored, at least from the computational point of view. Yet, complex fluids produce much richer physics than classical fluids when they interact with solids, especially at small scales. Here, we couple a nonlinear hyperelastic solid with a single-component two-phase flow, where the fluid can condensate and evaporate naturally due to temperature and/or pressure changes. We propose a fully-coupled fluid-structure interaction algorithm to solve the problem. We illustrate the viability of the theoretical framework and the effectiveness of our algorithms by solving several problems of phase-change-driven implosion, a physical process in which a thin structure collapses due to the condensation of a fluid.