A numerical study on the fluid compressibility effects in strongly coupled fluid–solid interaction problems

Interactions between an incompressible fluid passing through a flexible tube and the elastic wall is one of the strongly coupled fluid–solid interaction (FSI) problems frequently studied in the literature due to its research importance and wide range of applications. Although incompressible fluid is a prevalent model in many simulation studies, the assumption of incompressibility may not be appropriate in strongly coupled FSI problems. This paper narrowly aims to study the effect of the fluid compressibility on the wave propagation and fluid–solid interactions in a flexible tube. A partitioned FSI solver is used which employs a finite volume-based fluid solver. For the sake of comparison, both traditional incompressible (ico) and weakly compressible (wco) fluid models are used in an Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) formulation and a PISO-like algorithm is used to solve the unsteady flow equations on a collocated mesh. The solid part is modeled as a simple hyperelastic material obeying the St-Venant constitutive relation. Computational results show that not only use of the weakly compressible fluid model makes the FSI solver in this case more efficient, but also the incompressible fluid model may produce largely unrealistic computational results. Therefore, the use of the weakly compressible fluid model is suggested for strongly coupled FSI problems involving seemingly incompressible fluids such as water especially in cases where wave propagation in the solid plays an important role.