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This paper presents a computational approach for finding the optimal shapes of peristaltic pumps transporting rigid particles in Stokes flow. In particular, we consider shapes that minimize the rate of energy dissipation while pumping a prescribed volume of fluid, number of particles, and/or distance traversed by the particles over a set time period. Our approach relies on a recently developed fast and accurate boundary integral solver for simulating multiphase flows through periodic geometries of arbitrary shapes. In order to fully capitalize on the dimensionality reduction feature of the boundary integral methods, shape sensitivities must ideally involve evaluating the physical variables on the particle or pump boundaries only. We show that this can indeed be accomplished owing to the linearity of Stokes flow. The forward problem solves for the particle motion in a slip-driven pipe flow while the adjoint problems in our construction solve quasi-static Dirichlet boundary value problems backwards in time, retracing the particle evolution. The shape sensitivities simply depend on the solution of one forward and one adjoint (for each shape functional) problems. We validate these analytic shape derivative formulas by comparing against finite-difference based gradients and present several examples showcasing optimal pump shapes under various constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that the standard boundary integral operators, defined on the unit sphere, for the Stokes equations diagonalize on a specific set of vector spherical harmonics and provide formulas for their spectra. We also derive analytical expressions for evaluating the operators away from the boundary. When two particle are located close to each other, we use a truncated series expansion to compute the hydrodynamic interaction. On the other hand, we use the standard spectrally accurate quadrature scheme to evaluate smooth integrals on the far-field, and accelerate the resulting discrete sums using the fast multipole method (FMM). We employ this discretization scheme to analyze several boundary integral formulations of interest including those arising in porous media flow, active matter and magneto-hydrodynamics of rigid particles. We provide numerical results verifying the accuracy and scaling of their evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Vesicles are locally-inextensible fluid membranes that can sustain bending. In this paper, we extend the study of Veerapaneni et al. [S.K. Veerapaneni, D. Gueyffier, G. Biros, D. Zorin, A numerical method for simulating the dynamics of 3D axisymmetric vesicles suspended in viscous flows, Journal of Computational Physics 228 (19) (2009) 7233–7249] to general non-axisymmetric vesicle flows in three dimensions. Although the main components of the algorithm are similar in spirit to the axisymmetric case (spectral approximation in space, semi-implicit time-stepping scheme), important new elements need to be introduced for a full 3D method. In particular, spatial quantities are discretized using spherical harmonics, and quadrature rules for singular surface integrals need to be adapted to this case; an algorithm for surface reparameterization is needed to ensure stability of the time-stepping scheme, and spectral filtering is introduced to maintain reasonable accuracy while minimizing computational costs. To characterize the stability of the scheme and to construct preconditioners for the iterative linear system solvers used in the semi-implicit time-stepping scheme, we perform a spectral analysis of the evolution operator on the unit sphere. By introducing these algorithmic components, we obtain a time-stepping scheme that circumvents the stability constraint on the time-step and achieves spectral accuracy in space. We present results to analyze the cost and convergence rates of the overall scheme. To illustrate the applicability of the new method, we consider a few vesicle-flow interaction problems: a single vesicle in relaxation, sedimentation, shear flows, and many-vesicle flows. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

While potential theoretic techniques have received significant interest and found broad success in the solution of linear partial differential equations (PDEs) in mathematical physics, limited adoption is reported in the case of nonlinear and/or inhomogeneous problems (i.e. with distributed volumetric sources) owing to outstanding challenges in producing a particular solution on complex domains while simultaneously respecting the competing ideals of allowing complete geometric flexibility, enabling source adaptivity, and achieving optimal computational complexity. This article presents a new high-order accurate algorithm for finding a particular solution to the PDE by means of a convolution of the volumetric source function with the Green's function in complex geometries. Utilizing volumetric domain decomposition, the integral is computed over a union of regular boxes (lending the scheme compatibility with adaptive box codes) and triangular regions (which may be potentially curved near boundaries). Singular and near-singular quadrature is handled by converting integrals on volumetric regions to line integrals bounding a reference volume cell using cell mappings and elements of the Poincaré lemma, followed by leveraging existing one-dimensional near-singular and singular quadratures appropriate to the singular nature of the kernel. The scheme achieves compatibility with fast multipole methods (FMMs) and thereby optimal asymptotic complexity by coupling global rules for target-independent quadrature of smooth functions to local target-dependent singular quadrature corrections, and it relies on orthogonal polynomial systems on each cell for well-conditioned, high-order and efficient (with respect to number of required volume function evaluations) approximation of arbitrary volumetric sources. Our domain discretization scheme is naturally compatible with standard meshing software such as Gmsh, which are employed to discretize a narrow region surrounding the domain boundaries. We present 8th-order accurate results, demonstrate the success of the method with examples showing up to 12-digit accuracy on complex geometries, and, for static geometries, our numerical examples show well over 99% of evaluation time of the particular solution is spent in the FMM step. • High-order accurate evaluation of Newton potential in complex geometry. • High-order accurate solution of inhomogeneous PDEs using potential theory. • Optimal complexity, adaptivity-compatible algorithms. • Novel methods for singular and near-singular multi-dimensional quadrature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new derivation of a boundary integral equation (BIE) for simulating the three-dimensional dynamics of arbitrarily-shaped rigid particles of genus zero immersed in a Stokes fluid, on which are prescribed forces and torques. Our method is based on a single-layer representation and leads to a simple second-kind integral equation. It avoids the use of auxiliary sources within each particle that play a role in some classical formulations. We use a spectrally accurate quadrature scheme to evaluate the corresponding layer potentials, so that only a small number of spatial discretization points per particle are required. The resulting discrete sums are computed in O ( n ) time, where n denotes the number of particles, using the fast multipole method (FMM). The particle positions and orientations are updated by a high-order time-stepping scheme. We illustrate the accuracy, conditioning and scaling of our solvers with several numerical examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A spectrally-accurate close evaluation scheme for Stokes boundary integral operators. • Adaptive panel refinement for arbitrarily shaped boundaries. • Graded meshes to treat corners. • Example problems from microfluidic chip design and vascular network flows. We present a fast, high-order accurate and adaptive boundary integral scheme for solving the Stokes equations in complex—possibly nonsmooth—geometries in two dimensions. We apply the panel-based quadratures of Helsing and coworkers to evaluate to high accuracy the weakly-singular, hyper-singular, and super-singular integrals arising in the Nyström discretization, and also the near-singular integrals needed for flow and traction evaluation close to boundaries. The resulting linear system is solved iteratively via calls to a Stokes fast multipole method. We include an automatic algorithm to "panelize" a given geometry, and choose a panel order, which will efficiently approximate the density (and hence solution) to a user-prescribed tolerance. We show that this adaptive panel refinement procedure works well in practice even in the case of complex geometries with large number of corners, or close-to-touching smooth curves. In one example, for instance, a model 2D vascular network with 378 corners required less than 200K discretization points to obtain a 9-digit solution accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]