Investigation on the effect of density ratio on the convergence behavior of partitioned method for fluid–structure interaction simulation

In order to investigate the effect of density ratio of fluid and solid on the convergence behavior of partitioned FSI algorithm, three strong-coupling partitioned algorithms (fixed-point method with a constant under-relaxation parameter, Aitken's method and Quasi-Newton inverse least squares (QN-ILS) method) have been considered in the context of finite element method. We have employed the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations for a Newtonian fluid domain and the total Lagrangian formulation for a non-linear motion of solid domain. Linear-elastic (hyper-elastic) model has been employed for solid material with small (large) deformation. A pulsatile inlet-flow interacting with a 2D circular channel of linear-elastic material and a pressure wave propagation in a 3D flexible vessel have been simulated. Both linear-elastic and hyper-elastic (Mooney–Rivlin) models have been adopted for the 3D flexible vessel. From the present numerical experiments, we have found that QN-ILS outperforms the others leading to a robust convergence regardless of the density ratio for both linear-elastic and hyper-elastic models. On the other hand, the performances of the fixed-point method with a constant under-relaxation parameter and the Aitken's method depend strongly on the density ratio, relaxation parameter selected for coupling iteration, and degree of deformation. Although the QN-ILS of this work is still slower than a monolithic method for serial computation, it has an advantage of easier parallelization due to the modularity of the partitioned FSI algorithm.