Handling contacts in an Eulerian frame: a finite element approach for fluid structures with contacts

ABSTRACT

Eulerian variational formulations for deformable solids, with or without fluids around them, end up, after implicit time discretisation, as large non-linear systems for the velocities in the moving domains. Handling moving domains and moving boundaries requires careful meshing procedures; on the other hand, the detection of contact is particularly simple with a distance function. Then at every time step, a variational inequality can be used to update the velocities. This article gives new implementation details and two new complex simulations: a very soft bouncing ball in an axisymmetric flow and a disk hit by a club.