A smoothed finite element approach for computational fluid dynamics: applications to incompressible flows and fluid-structure interaction

In this paper the cell-based smoothed finite element method (CS-FEM) is introduced into two mainstream aspects of computational fluid dynamics: incompressible flows and fluid-structure interaction (FSI). The emphasis is placed on the fluid gradient smoothing which simply requires equal numbers of Gaussian points and smoothing cells in each four-node quadrilateral element. The second-order, smoothed characteristic-based split scheme in conjunction with a pressure stabilization is then presented to settle the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. As for FSI, CS-FEM is applied to the geometrically nonlinear solid as usual. Following an efficient mesh deformation strategy, block-Gauss-Seidel procedure is adopted to couple all individual fields under the arbitrary Lagriangian-Eulerian description. The proposed solvers are carefully validated against the previously published data for several benchmarks, revealing visible improvements in computed results.