ALE Fractional Step Finite Element Method for Fluid-Structure Nonlinear Interaction Problem

A computational procedure is developed to solve the problems of coupled motion of a structure and a viscous incompressible fluid. In order to incorporate the effect of the moving surface of the structure as well as the free surface motion, the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation is employed as the basis of the finite element spatial discretization. For numerical integration in time, the fraction step method is used. This method is useful because one can use the same linear interpolation function for both velocity and pressure. The method is applied to the nonlinear interaction of a structure and a tuned liquid damper. All computations are performed with a personal computer.