Direct simulation of flows with suspended paramagnetic particles using one-stage smoothed profile method

The so-called smoothed profile method, originally suggested by Nakayama and Yamamoto and further improved by Luo et al. in 2005 and 2009, respectively, is an efficient numerical solver for fluid–structure interaction problems, which represents the particles by a certain smoothed profile on a fixed grid and constructs some form of body force added into the momentum (Navier–Stokes) equation by ensuring the rigidity of particles. For numerical simulations, the method first advances the flow and pressure fields by integrating the momentum equation except the body-force (momentum impulse) term in time and next updates them by separately taking temporal integration of the body-force term, thus requiring one more Poisson-equation solver for the extra pressure field due to the rigidity of particles to ensure the divergence-free constraint of the total velocity field. In the present study, we propose a simplified version of the smoothed profile method or the one-stage method, which combines the two stages of velocity update (temporal integration) into one to eliminate the necessity for the additional solver and, thus, significantly save the computational cost. To validate the proposed one-stage method, we perform the so-called direct numerical simulations on the two-dimensional motion of multiple inertialess paramagnetic particles in a nonmagnetic fluid subjected to an external uniform magnetic field and compare their results with the existing benchmark solutions. For the validation, we develop the finite-volume version of the direct simulation method by employing the proposed one-stage method. Comparison shows that the proposed one-stage method is very accurate and efficient in direct simulations of such magnetic particulate flows.