Free-surface flow interactions with deformable structures using an SPH-FEM model

A two-dimensional SPH-FEM model is proposed to investigate its application in the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem. The fluid model is based on the theory of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and the structural dynamics employ a large-deformation Finite Element Method (FEM). This paper describes the basics of both SPH and FEM models and presents the development of a loosely coupled SPH-FEM model. Validation results of two benchmark FSI problems are illustrated. The first test case is flow in a sloshing tank interacting with an elastic body (Souto-lglesias et al., 2008) and the second one is dam-break flow through an elastic gate (Antoci et al., 2007). The results obtained with the SPH-FEM model show good agreement with published experimental results and suggest that the SPH-FEM model is a viable and effective numerical tool for FSI problems. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.