
Interaction of incompressible fluids and shells disregarding the shell thickness in the flow dynamics and using a solid model for the shell
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This work presents a methodology to approximate the Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) problem when the solid is a shell, that is to say, the width is very thin and its effect on the flow dynamics is that of a surface embedded in the fluid. This shell, which is subject to finite strains, is modelled using a solid-shell approach with the stress-displacement stabilised finite element formulation developed in [1,2]. This formulation is able to cope with all types of numerical locking that may be encountered in solids in which one of the dimensions tends to zero while the other two are kept constant. The key feature is that the stabilised formulation permits the use of the same interpolation for the displacements and the stresses. The fluid is considered as incompressible and approximated also using a stabilised finite element method with equal interpolation for velocities and pressure. When considering the effect of the shell on the fluid, its thickness is considered negligible, and therefore the effect is that of a surface acting as an interface separating the fluid. This has the effect of disconnecting the two sides of the flow domain, and in particular introducing a discontinuity in the pressure. This discontinuity is better approximated by allowing the pressure field across an element to be discontinuous, and this is achieved by enriching the pressure interpolation with pressure jumps. Regarding the transmission conditions, in the simplest case the loads computed from the fluid on the two sides of the shell mid-surface are applied on the physical surfaces of the shell to compute its displacements and stresses, whereas the velocities of the shell mid-surface obtained by solving the solid problem are applied to the fluid weakly, using a Nitsche's method.