A fast algorithm for direct simulation of particulate flows using conforming grids

This paper presents a development of the direction splitting algorithm for flows in complex geometries proposed in [2] to the case of flows containing rigid particles. The main novelty of this method is that the grid is fit to the time-dependent domain at each time step which allows for an optimal spatial approximation of the Navier–Stokes equations. In general, this is a very hard task for multidimensional problems. However, it is significantly simplified if the momentum equations are discretized by a direction splitting scheme. Such a scheme requires only solving a set of one-dimensional problems, and the grid can be easily fit to the boundary in the direction of each of these problems. Here we use a MAC discretization stencil but the same idea can be applied to other discretizations. The equations of motion of each particle are discretized explicitly and the computed particle velocities are imposed as Dirichlet boundary conditions for the Navier–Stokes equations on the adapted grid. The pressure is extended within the particles in a fictitious domain fashion, but the divergence stencil is fit to the particle boundaries. In this paper, the direction splitting algorithm with boundary fitting is compared to pure fictitious domain methods.