An improved immersed boundary method with direct forcing for the simulation of particle laden flows

An efficient approach for the simulation of finite-size particles with interface resolution was presented by Uhlmann (J. Comput. Phys, Vol. 209, pp. 448-476, 2005). The present paper proposes several enhancements of this method which considerably improve the results and extend the range of applicability. An important step is a simple low-cost iterative procedure for the Euler-Lagrange coupling yielding a substantially better imposition of boundary conditions at the interface, even for large time steps. Furthermore, it is known that the basic method is restricted to ratios of particle density and fluid density larger than some critical value above 1, hence excluding, for example, non-buoyant particles. This can be remedied by an efficient integration step for the artificial flow field inside the particles to extend the accessible density range down to 0.3. This paper also shows that the basic scheme is inconsistent when moving surfaces are allowed to approach closer than twice the step size. A remedy is developed based on excluding from the force computation all surface markers whose stencil overlaps with the stencil of a marker located on the surface of a collision partner. The resulting algorithm is throughly validated and is demonstrated to substantially improve upon the original method.