Numerical Simulations of Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow Problems Using an Immersed-Boundary Finite-Volume Method on NonStaggered Grids

ABSTRACT

This article describes the application of the immersed boundary technique for simulating fluid flow and heat transfer problems over or inside complex geometries. The methodology is based on a fractional step method to integrate in time. The governing equations are discretized and solved on a regular mesh with a finite-volume nonstaggered grid technique. Implementations of Dirichlet and Neumann types of boundary conditions are developed and completely validated. Several phenomenologically different fluid flow and heat transfer problems are simulated using the technique considered in this study. The accuracy of the method is second-order, and the efficiency is verified by favorable comparison with previous results from numerical simulations and laboratory experiments.

The authors would like to thank Ms. Renate Mittelmann from the Department of Mathematics at Arizona State University for access to computer facilities. We also acknowledge the useful comments of Dr. Andrew Orr from University College London and of the anonymous referees for bringing to our attention the immersed continuum method.