Treatment of solid objects in the Pencil Code using an immersed boundary method and overset grids

Two methods for solid body representation in flow simulations available in the Pencil Code are the immersed boundary method and overset grids. These methods are quite different in terms of computational cost, flexibility and numerical accuracy. We present here an investigation of the use of the diff...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geophysical and astrophysical fluid dynamics 2020-03, Vol.114 (1-2), p.35-57
Main Authors: Aarnes, Jørgen R., Jin, Tai, Mao, Chaoli, Haugen, Nils E. L., Luo, Kun, Andersson, Helge I.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
complex geometries
compressible fluid dynamics
Computational efficiency
Computer simulation
Computing costs
Cylinders
Flexibility
Flow simulation
Grid method
immersed boundary method
Methods
overset grids
Pencil code
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Summary:Two methods for solid body representation in flow simulations available in the Pencil Code are the immersed boundary method and overset grids. These methods are quite different in terms of computational cost, flexibility and numerical accuracy. We present here an investigation of the use of the different methods with the purpose of assessing their strengths and weaknesses. At present, the overset grid method in the Pencil Code can only be used for representing cylinders in the flow. For this task, it surpasses the immersed boundary method in yielding highly accurate solutions at moderate computational costs. This is partly due to local grid stretching and a body-conformal grid, and partly due to the possibility of working with local time step restrictions on different grids. The immersed boundary method makes up the lack of computational efficiency with flexibility in regard to application to complex geometries, due to a recent extension of the method that allows our implementation of it to represent arbitrarily shaped objects in the flow.
ISSN:0309-1929
1029-0419
DOI:10.1080/03091929.2018.1492720