An analysis and an affordable regularization technique for the spurious force oscillations in the context of direct-forcing immersed boundary methods

The framework of this paper is the improvement of direct-forcing immersed boundary methods in presence of moving obstacles. In particular, motivations for the use of the Direct Forcing (DF) method can be found in the advantage of a fixed computational mesh for fluid–structure interaction problems. Unfortunately, the direct forcing approach suffers a serious drawback in case of moving obstacles: the well known spurious force oscillations (SFOs). In this paper, we strengthen previous analyses of the origin of the SFO through a rigorous numerical evaluation based on Taylor expansions. We propose a remedy through an easy-to-implement regularization process (regularized DF). Formally, this regularization is related to the blending of the Navier–Stokes solver with the interpolation, but no modification of the numerical scheme is needed. This approach significantly cuts off the SFOs without increasing the computational cost. The accuracy and the space convergence order of the standard DF method are conserved. This is illustrated on numerical and physical validation test cases ranging from the Taylor–Couette problem to a cylinder with an imposed sinusoidal motion subjected to a cross-flow.