A stabilized finite element procedure for turbulent fluid-structure interaction using adaptive time-space refinement

This paper presents our effort to addressing fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems by means of computational mechanics. A stabilized finite element formulation is used to solve the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations written in primitive variables. The structure is modelled using rigid-body dynamic equations solved using a Runge-Kutta method. The distinctive feature of our approach is the combination of large eddy simulation (LES)-based on implicit turbulence modelling-with time-space adaptive techniques in arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian co-ordinates (ALE). Three representative numerical examples are presented. The first one is the simulation of turbulent vortex shedding around a fixed obstacle, comparing our two-dimensional (2D) LES results with experiments and more refined three-dimensional (3D) numerical solutions. The second example presents an ALE computation with moving boundaries, where we were able to detect the lock-in phenomenon for an oscillating cylinder driven by periodic vortex shedding. Our final example is the FSI problem associated to the flow around a dominant central span section of the Rio-Niteroi bridge, where we compare our results with experiments performed in a wind tunnel. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.