A sharp-interface Cartesian grid method for viscoelastic fluid flow in complex geometry

Computational methods based on Cartesian mesh are popular in simulating fluid flow with moving boundaries of complex geometry. In this paper, a sharp-interface Cartesian grid method is proposed for simulating viscoelastic fluid flow. We implement a finite volume numerical scheme with an improved Rhie-Chow interpolation on the open-source toolbox OpenFOAM. In the benchmark test of flow past a stationary cylinder, the velocity for Newtonian fluid flow is found to be second-order accurate with linear/bi-linear fitting functions for local reconstruction and third-order accurate with quadratic fitting functions. Only first-order accuracy is achieved with current solver for the Oldroyd-B fluid flows due to the difficulty in handling the extra stress near the boundary. However, our sharp-interface Cartesian grid method has been verified to correctly predict the extra stress on the surface of the cylinder. Simulation results of confined Oldroyd-B fluid flow past a pair of cylinders are also reported. A comparison between the proposed sharp-interface Cartesian grid method and a smoothed-interface immersed boundary method is carried out with respect to accuracy and efficiency. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.