A versatile sharp interface immersed boundary method for incompressible flows with complex boundaries

A sharp interface immersed boundary method for simulating incompressible viscous flow past three-dimensional immersed bodies is described. The method employs a multi-dimensional ghost-cell methodology to satisfy the boundary conditions on the immersed boundary and the method is designed to handle highly complex three-dimensional, stationary, moving and/or deforming bodies. The complex immersed surfaces are represented by grids consisting of unstructured triangular elements; while the flow is computed on non-uniform Cartesian grids. The paper describes the salient features of the methodology with special emphasis on the immersed boundary treatment for stationary and moving boundaries. Simulations of a number of canonical two- and three-dimensional flows are used to verify the accuracy and fidelity of the solver over a range of Reynolds numbers. Flow past suddenly accelerated bodies are used to validate the solver for moving boundary problems. Finally two cases inspired from biology with highly complex three-dimensional bodies are simulated in order to demonstrate the versatility of the method. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.