In the field of ocean engineering, the phenomena of fluid-structure interaction (FSI) often occur, which has destructive effect on offshore structures. In order to prolong the service life of structures, it is necessary to evaluate the dynamic responses of structures under the influence of violent flows. In this present work, an in-house solver MPSDEM-SJTU is developed based on the improved moving particle semi-implicit (MPS) method and discrete element method (DEM). The MPS method is used to simulate the movement of fluid while the DEM is employed to analyze the dynamic responses of structures. For the coupling algorithm, the pressure carried by MPS particles is passed to the DEM particles. In turn, the velocity and displacement information will be transferred from solid domain to fluid domain. The solver is validated by comparison with benchmark tests, such as the flood discharge with an elastic gate and dam-break with an elastic baffle. The numerical results show good agreement with experimental data and other numerical results.
The fluid-structure interaction problems with violent free surface flows widely occur in ocean engineering field, such as sloshing in the tank with elastic baffles (Zhang et al., 2016), solitary waves impacting on the horizontal plate (Rao and Wan, 2018) and dam-break flows interacting with elastic wall (Zhang and Wan, 2018). It is difficult for traditional grid-based methods to capture the complex free surface flows, especially for fragmentations and splashing. Besides, the structures with large deformation is also hard to handle, because the distorted grids may affect the accuracy of simulation and the remeshing is time-consuming. In the contrast, it is easy for particle methods to overcome these difficulties. There are no fixed topological relations among lagrangian particles and the information exchange isn't restricted to specific nodes. Therefore, the particle methods have the potential to be applied to severe FSI problems.
