Lucas Ribeiro de Azevedo
Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany

An open source non-Newtonian FSI solver implementation: extension for the fsiFoam and developed for foam-extended-3.1

This work is part of a bigger research project that is under development. The main numerical tool necessary to develop the mentioned research is a non-Newtonian Fluid Structure Interaction (nNFSI) solver. By means of numerical modeling the research project will present the optimisation of an advanced energy absorbing material. As far as the author’s awareness this is the first nNFSI solver for openFOAM. The initiative was based on an existing Newtonian Fluid Structure Interaction (NFSI) solver taking in consideration the principle of reusability of software, a well known engineering software principle. The original solver is able to simulate newtonian-Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) cases in parallel and is based on a finite volume discretisation, where a strongly coupled partitioned solution procedures is employed. The original FSI solver is part of an open-source framework (OpenFOAM) and is able to simulate incompressible fluid flows described by the Navier-Stokes equations in the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian form, and solid deformations described by the Saint Venant-Kirchhoff hyperelastic model in the total Lagrangian form using parallel computation. Being open-source is important since it is open to scrutiny by other researchers and available for further developments and modifications, such as the one described in this work, with no additional costs. OpenFOAM is an object-oriented library/toolkit for Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) and Structural Analysis (SA). Furthermore, is widely spread across industrial and academic environments. Compared to using proprietary CFD and SA codes, the advantage of using OpenFOAM lies in the Open-Source General public License (GPL) licensing which allows the user to freely use and freely modify a modern high-end CFD and SA code. Also, such a licensing enables the toolkit to be used as common platform for collaborative projects. Finally, the development and implementation of novel or experimental methods is accelerated because the developer starts working from an existing code base and not from scratch.