Department of Aerospace Engineering

CFDC Seminar Series: "Modeling and Simulations of Fluid and Deformable-Structure Interactions" - Dr. Lucy Zhang, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Lucy Zhang

Dr. Lucy Zhang, Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

Computational Fluid Dynamics Seminar Series

Tuesday, October 13, 2009
4:10 - 5:00 PM
Room 1235 Howe Hall

Modeling and Simulations of Fluid and Deformable-Structure Interactions

Fluid-structure interactions exist in many aspects of our daily lives. Some biomedical engineering examples are blood flowing through a blood vessel and blood pumping in the heart. Fluid interacting with moving or deformable structures poses more numerical challenges for its complexity in dealing with transient and simultaneous interactions between the fluid and solid domains. To obtain stable, effective, and accurate solutions is not trivial. Traditional methods that are available in commercial software often generate numerical instabilities.In this talk, a novel numerical solution technique, Immersed Finite Element Method (IFEM), is introduced for solving complex fluid-structure interaction problems in various engineering fields. The fluid and solid domains are fully coupled, thus yield accurate and stable solutions. The variables in the two domains are interpolated via a delta function that enables the use of non-uniform grids in the fluid domain, which allows the use of arbitrary geometry shapes and boundary conditions. This method extends the capabilities and flexibilities in solving various biomedical, traditional mechanical, and aerospace engineering problems with detailed and realistic mechanics analysis. Verification problems will be shown to validate the accuracy and effectiveness of this numerical approach.

Brief Bio:  Lucy T. Zhang, Ph.D. received her B.S from Binghamton University in 1998, and obtained her M.S and PhD from Northwestern University in 2000 and 2003, respectively. Upon the completion of her Ph.D. in 2003, she joined the Mechanical Engineering department at Tulane University in New Orleans as an assistant professor. In 2006, she became a faculty in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at RPI. Her research focuses on computational mechanics with special emphasis on fluid-structure interactions, computational biomechanics, and multiscale modeling of interfacial interactions.