Fluid structure interaction with large structural displacements Original Research Article

The calculation of viscous flows inside deformable structures faces major difficulties when enforcing the kinematic compatibility at the fluid structure interface and updating the geometry of the domain. This paper proposes to overcome these problems by considering the fluid and the structure as a unique continuous medium, to be studied in a fixed reference configuration. The resulting problem is then split into a fluid and a structural part through an additive decomposition of the space of kinematically admissible test functions. This approach treats the structure in a fully Lagrangian way and uses an associated arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) formulation for the fluid. Such a strategy has three advantages which are detailed in the present paper.