A coupled Immersed Boundary-Lattice Boltzmann method for incompressible flows through moving porous media

In this work, we propose a numerical framework to simulate fluid flows in interaction with moving porous media of complex geometry. It is based on the Lattice Boltzmann method including porous effects via a Brinkman-Forchheimer-Darcy force model coupled to the Immersed Boundary method to handle complex geometries and moving structures. The coupling algorithm is described in detail and it is validated on well-established literature test cases for both stationary and moving porous configurations. The proposed method is easy to implement and efficient in terms of CPU cost and memory management compared to alternative methods which can be used to deal with moving immersed porous media, e.g. re-meshing at each time step or use of a moving/chimera mesh. An overall good agreement was obtained with reference results, opening the way to the numerical simulation of moving porous media for flow control applications. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.