Simulation of oscillatory flow in an aortic bifurcation using FVM and FEM: A comparative study of implementation strategies

Cardiovascular diseases are one of the major causes of long‐term morbidity and mortality in human beings. The nearly epidemic increase in prevalence of such diseases poses a serious threat to public health and calls for efficient methods of diagnosis and treatment. Non‐invasive diagnostic procedures such as MRI are often used in this context; however, these are limited in terms of spatial and temporal resolution and do not provide information on time‐dependent pressures and wall shear stresses—key quantities considered to be partially responsible for the formation and development of related pathologies. The present study is concerned with the numerical simulation of oscillatory flow through the abdominal aortic bifurcation. Computational fluid dynamics simulation of oscillatory flow in a branched geometry at high Reynolds numbers poses considerable challenges. The present study reports a detailed comparison of simulations performed with a finite volume and a finite element method, two approaches with significant differences in their discretization strategy, treatment of boundary conditions and other numerical aspects. Both solvers were parallelized, using loop parallelization of the BiCGStab linear solver for the finite volume and domain decomposition based on the Schur complement method for the finite element technique. The experience gained with these two approaches for the solution of flow in a bifurcation forms the focus of this study. Although similar results were obtained for both methods, the computation time required for convergence was found to be significantly smaller for the finite element approach. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stokes flow past an assemblage of slip eccentric spherical particle‐in‐cell models

The quasisteady axisymmetrical flow of an incompressible viscous fluid past an assemblage of slip eccentric spherical particle‐in‐cell models with Happel and Kuwabara boundary conditions is investigated. A linear slip, Basset type, boundary condition on the surface of the spherical particle is used. Under the Stokesian approximation, a general solution is constructed from the superposition of the basic solutions in the two spherical coordinate systems based on the particle and fictitious spherical envelope. The boundary conditions on the particle's surface and fictitious spherical envelope are satisfied by a collocation technique. Numerical results for the normalized drag force acting on the particle are obtained with good convergence for various values of the volume fraction, the relative distance between the centers of the particle and fictitious envelope and the slip coefficient of the particle. In the limits of the motions of the spherical particle in the concentric position with cell surface and near the cell surface with a small curvature, the numerical values of the normalized drag force are in good agreement with the available values in the literature. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temperature Modulated DSC for the Investigation of Polymer Materials: A brief account of recent studies

Temperature modulated differential scanning calorimetry (TMDSC), the most recent development that adds periodic modulation to the conventional DSC, has recently seen a fast growth due to availability of commercial instrumentation. The use of the technique necessitates a total control of all of the experimental parameters. The paper focuses on recent applications to investigate polymers [1].This revised version was published online in November 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Numerical investigation of hypersonic step-flows

Hypersonic aerospace vehicles are exposed to extreme flight conditions with heavy contour loads during their mission. Especially at ridges and sharp corners, the wall heat flux and pressure may cause serious damage to the body. Sometimes, the surface material cannot resist the high loading and fails completely. In this work the laminar hypersonic flow over forward and backward facing steps is investigated by CFD techniques and the results are compared with experimental data. The selected flow conditions correspond to cold hypersonic flow according to the availability of experimental data. The Navier-Stokes equations in the high temperature gas approximation of a thermally perfect gas in local equilibrium serve as the model for the physical problem. A multiblock finite-volume method is used to discretize consistently all spatial derivatives appearing in the balance equations. A second order in space Godunov-type method is utilized for the non-diffusive part of the governing equations whereas centered differences are used for the diffusive part. Time integration is performed by a second order implicit scheme. In each time step, the resulting nonlinear system of equations is solved by Newton's method employing a relaxation scheme based on conjugate gradients for the linear equation system. The results obtained permit a close insight into the physics of the flow problems under consideration and by this provide valuable information for construction concepts of hypersonic vehicles. Besides a careful comparison of the numerical results with experimental data, numerical aspects like the grid influence are addressed. Received 9 November 1998 / Accepted 2 December 1999     

Magnetically-driven heat transport device using a binary temperature-sensitive magnetic fluid

The magnetic body force in boiling two-phase temperature-sensitive magnetic fluid (TSMF) flow is known to effectively increase the driving force of magnetic fluid in a non-uniform magnetic field. Based on this mechanism, in the present study, a binary TSMF, which is a mixture of the TSMF and a low-boiling-saturation-temperature organic solution, is proposed to be used in a heat transport device to enhance its circulation. In order to see its performance in the heat transport device, the pressure difference at different heated temperatures, magnetic fields and inclination angles of the heating section are investigated experimentally and theoretically. Results showed that the driving force increases remarkably due to more gas phase appearing in the test fluid and the magnetization of it decreasing. At low magnetic field the driving force is enhanced greatly when the inclination angle is close to 60°, while at high magnetic field the driving force is remarkably enhanced due to the effect of the magnetic force in the inclination angle range from 0° to 30° and 60° to 90°.     

Comparison of several models for multi-size bubbly flows on an adiabatic experiment

This paper deals with the modelling and numerical simulation of isothermal bubbly flows with multi-size bubbles. The study of isothermal bubbly flows without phase change is a first step towards the more general study of boiling bubbly flows. Here, we are interested in taking into account the features of such isothermal flow associated to the multiple sizes of the different bubbles simultaneously present inside the flow. With this aim, several approaches have been developed. In this paper, two of these approaches are described and their results are compared to experimental data, as well as to those of an older approach assuming a single average size of bubbles. These two approaches are (i) the moment density approach for which two different expressions for the bubble diameter distribution function are proposed and (ii) the multi-field approach. All the models are implemented into the NEPTUNE_CFD code and are compared to a test performed on the MTLOOP facility. These comparisons show their respective merits and shortcomings in their available state of development.     

A multigrid approach for steady state laminar viscous flows

In this paper, we use the laminar viscous flow in a lid‐driven cavity as an example to describe and verify a numerical scheme for non‐linear partial differential equations. The proposed scheme combines a new analytical method for strongly non‐linear problems, namely the homotopy analysis method, with the multigrid techniques. A family of formulas at different orders is given. At the lowest order, the current approach is the same as the traditional multigrid methods. However, our high‐order scheme needs a fewer number of iterations and less CPU time than the classical ones. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal Control for an Obstruction Problem

A question of flow around an obstacle leads to an optimal control problem. If an optimum path exists, then it is calculable from the Pontryagin principle. The optimum is verified to be reached, using a discretization of the problem.     

Numerical Approaches to Optimal Control of a Model Equation for Shear Flow Instabilities

We investigate two different discretization approaches of a model optimal-control problem, chosen to be relevant for control of instabilities in shear flows. In the first method, a fully discrete approach has been used, together with a finite-element spatial discretization, to obtain the objective function gradient in terms of a discretely-derived adjoint equation. In the second method, Chebyshev collocation is used for spatial discretization, and the gradient is approximated by discretizing the continuously-derived adjoint equation. The discrete approach always results in a faster convergence of the conjugate-gradient optimization algorithm. Due to the shear in the convective velocity, a low diffusivity in the problem complicates the structure of the computed optimal control, resulting in particularly noticeable differences in convergence rate between the methods. When the diffusivity is higher, the control becomes less complicated, and the difference in convergence rate reduces. The use of approximate gradients results in a higher sensitivity to the degrees of freedom in time. When the system contains a strong instability, it only takes a few iteration to obtain an effective control for both methods,even if there are differences in the formal convergence rate. This indicates that it is possible to use the approximative gradients of the objective function in cases where the control problem mainly consists of controlling strong instabilities. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

更新过程理论在交通流上的一个应用

一个更新过程的两个随机变量的分布:间隔分布、计数分布是1—1对应的,但由间隔分布求对应的计数分布的问题尚未很好地解决。在道路断面观测交通流可得到一更新过程,车头时距和车辆到达分别是其间隔和计数。时距分布容易观测得到,而到达分布的观测却较难。因此上述数学问题的解决对交通流理论是非常有意义的,本文将研究之。