Fully resolved viscoelastic particulate simulations using unstructured grids

Viscoelastic particulate suspensions play a key role in many energy applications. Our goal is to develop a simulation-based tool for engineering such suspensions. This study is concerned with fully resolved simulations, wherein all flow scales associated with the particle motion are resolved. The present effort is based on Immersed Boundary (IB) methods, in which the domain grids do not conform to the particle geometry. The particles are defined on a separate Lagrangian mesh that is free to move over an underlying Eulerian grid. An immersed boundary forcing technique for moving bodies within an unstructured-mesh, non-Newtonian viscoelastic flow solver is thus developed and described. This method is implemented in a massively parallel, finite-volume-based incompressible fluid solver. A number of flows, simulated using this method are presented to assess the accuracy and correctness of the algorithm. ∗Corresponding Author Email addresses: [email protected] (Sreenath Krishnan), [email protected] (Eric S.G Shaqfeh), [email protected] (Gianluca Iaccarino) Preprint submitted to Journal of Computational Physics February 4, 2016