On the role of (weak) compressibility for fluid-structure interaction solvers

In the present study, a weakly compressible formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations is developed and examined for the solution of fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems. Newtonian viscous fluids under isothermal conditions are considered, and the Murnaghan-Tait equation of state is employed for the evaluation of mass density changes with pressure. A pressure-based approach is adopted to handle the low Mach number regime, ie, the pressure is chosen as primary variable, and the divergence-free condition of the velocity field for incompressible flows is replaced by the continuity equation for compressible flows. The approach is then embedded into a partitioned FSI solver based on a Dirichlet-Neumann coupling scheme. It is analytically demonstrated how this formulation alleviates the constraints of the instability condition of the artificial added mass effect, due to the reduction of the maximal eigenvalue of the so-called added mass operator. The numerical performance is examined on a selection of benchmark problems. In comparison to a fully incompressible solver, a significant reduction of the coupling iterations and the computational time and a notable increase in the relaxation parameter evaluated according to Aitken's Delta(2) method are observed.