A projection semi-implicit scheme for the coupling of an elastic structure with an incompressible fluid

We address the numerical simulation of fluid–structure systems involving an incompressible viscous fluid. This issue is particularly difficult to face when the fluid added-mass acting on the structure is strong, as it happens in hemodynamics for example. Indeed, several works have shown that, in such situations, implicit coupling seems to be necessary in order to avoid numerical instabilities. Although significant improvements have been achieved during the last years, solving implicit coupling often exhibits a prohibitive computational cost. In this work, we introduce a semi-implicit coupling scheme which remains stable for a reasonable range of the discretization parameters. The first idea consists in treating implicitly the added-mass effect, whereas the other contributions (geometrical non-linearities, viscous and convective effects) are treated explicitly. The second idea, relies on the fact that this kind of explicit–implicit splitting can be naturally performed using a Chorin–Temam projection scheme in the fluid. We prove (conditional) stability of the scheme for a fully discrete formulation. Several numerical experiments point out the efficiency of the present scheme compared to several implicit approaches. Copyright q 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.