A hybrid immersed-boundary and multi-block lattice Boltzmann method for simulating fluid and moving-boundaries interactions

A numerical method is developed for modelling the interactions between incompressible viscous fluid and moving boundaries. The principle of this method is introducing the immersed-boundary concept in the framework of the lattice Boltzmann method, and improving the accuracy and efficiency of the simulation by refining the mesh near moving boundaries. Besides elastic boundary with a constitutive law, the method can also efficiently simulate solid moving-boundary interacting with fluid by employing the direct forcing technique. The method is validated by the simulations of flow past a circular cylinder, two cylinders moving with respect to each other and flow around a hovering wing. The versatility of the method is demonstrated by the numerical studies including elastic filament flapping in the wake of a cylinder and fish-like bodies swimming in quiescent fluid. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.