Stabilization of staggered solution procedures for fluid--structure interaction analysis

Abstract

This paper addresses direct time integration techniques for the transient response analysis of coupled fluid-structure problems treated by a class of surface interaction approximations. Efficient solution of the resulting equations of motion can be achieved by a modular computer implementation in which separate fluid and structure analyzers are interfaced through extrapolation of the coupling terms. Such an implementation is herein called a staggered solution strategy. The conventional realization of this strategy is handicapped, however, by severe temporal stepsize limitations. Several stabilized formulations are introduced, which circumvent such limitations and achieve unconditional stability for certain extrapolators.