| Numerical models of fluid-structure interaction have grown in importance due to increasing interest in environmental energy harvesting, airfoil-gust interactions, and bio-inspired formation flying. Powered by increasingly powerful parallel computers, such models seek to explain the fundamental physics behind the complex, unsteady fluid-structure phenomena. To this end, a high-fidelity computational model based on the high-order spectral difference method on 3D unstructured, dynamic meshes has been developed. The spectral difference method constructs continuous solution fields within each element with a Riemann solver to compute the inviscid fluxes at the element interfaces and an averaging mechanism to compute the viscous fluxes. This method has shown promise in the past as a highly accurate, yet sufficiently fast method for solving unsteady viscous compressible flows. The solver is monolithically coupled to the equations of motion of an elastically mounted 3-degree of freedom rigid bluff body undergoing flow-induced lift, drag, and torque. The mesh is deformed using 4 methods: an analytic function, Laplace equation, biharmonic equation, and a bi-elliptic equation with variable diffusivity. This single system of equations -- fluid and structure -- is advanced through time using a 5-stage, 4th-order Runge-Kutta scheme. Message Passing Interface is used to run the coupled system in parallel on up to 240 processors. The solver is validated against previously published numerical and experimental data for an elastically mounted cylinder. The effect of adding an upstream body and inducing wake galloping is observed. |
