ABSTRACT

Physical systems in which fluid flows interact with immersed structures are found in a wide range of areas of science and engineering. Such fluid-structure interactions are ubiquitous in biological systems, including blood flow in the heart, the ingestion of food, and mucus transport in the lung. Fluid-structure interaction is also a crucial aspect of new approaches to energy harvesting, such as wave-energy converters that extract energy from the motion of sea or ocean waves, and in advanced approaches to manufacturing, such as 3D printing. This award supports the development of an advanced computer simulation infrastructure for modeling this full range of application areas. Computer models advanced by this project could ultimately lead to improved diagnostics and treatments for human disease, optimized designs of novel approaches to renewable energy, and reduced manufacturing costs through improved production times in 3D printing.

This project aims to enhance the IBAMR computer modeling and simulation infrastructure that provides advanced implementations of the immersed boundary (IB) method and its extensions with support for adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). IBAMR is designed to simulate large-scale fluid-structure interaction models on distributed memory-parallel systems. Most current IBAMR models assume that the properties of the fluid are uniform, but many physical systems involve multiphase fluid models with inhomogeneous properties, such as air-water interfaces or the complex fluid environments of biological systems. This project aims to extend recently developed support in IBAMR for treating multiphase flows by improving the accuracy and efficiency of IBAMR's treatment of multiphase Newtonian flows, and also by extending this multiphase flow modeling capability to treat multiphase complex (polymeric) fluid flows, which are commonly encountered in biological systems, and to treat reacting flows with complex chemistry, which are relevant to models of combustion, astrophysics, and additive manufacturing using stereolithography (3D printing). This project also aims to re-engineer IBAMR for massive parallelism, so that it may effectively use very large computational resources in service of applications that require very high fidelity. The project will also develop modules that will facilitate the use of image-derived geometries, and it will develop novel fluid-structure coupling schemes that will facilitate the use of independent fluid and solid solvers. These capabilities are motivated within this project by models of cardiac, gastrointestinal, and lung physiology; renewable energy; and advanced manufacturing. This software will be used in courses developed by the members of the project team. The project also aims to grow the community of IBAMR users by enhancing project documentation and training materials, hosting user group meetings, and offering short courses.

This award by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is co funded by the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation to provide enabling tools to advance potentially transformative fundamental research, particularly in biomechanics and mechanobiology.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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