A Full Eulerian Fluid-Membrane Coupling Method with a Smoothed Volume-of-Fluid Approach

A novel full Eulerian fluid-elastic membrane coupling method on the fixed Cartesian coordinate mesh is proposed within the framework of the volume-of-fluid approach.The present method is based on a full Eulerian fluid-(bulk)structure coupling solver(Sugiyama et al.,J.Comput.Phys.,230(2011)596–627),with the bulk structure replaced by elastic membranes.In this study,a closed membrane is considered,and it is described by a volume-of-fluid or volume-fraction information generally called VOF function.A smoothed indicator(or characteristic)function is introduced as a phase indicator which results in a smoothed VOF function.This smoothed VOF function uses a smoothed delta function,and it enables a membrane singular force to be incorporated into a mixture momentum equation.In order to deal with a membrane deformation on the Eulerian mesh,a deformation tensor is introduced and updated within a compactly supported region near the interface.Both the neo-Hookean and the Skalak models are employed in the numerical simulations.A smoothed(and less dissipative)interface capturing method is employed for the advection of the VOF function and the quantities defined on the membrane.The stability restriction due to membrane stiffness is relaxed by using a quasi-implicit approach.The present method is validated by using the spherical membrane deformation problems,and is applied to a pressure-driven flow with the biconcave membrane capsules(red blood cells).

CONVERGENCE ANALYSIS ON ITERATIVE METHODS FOR SEMIDEFINITE SYSTEMS

The convergence analysis on the general iterative methods for the symmetric and positive semidefinite problems is presented in this paper. First, formulated are refined necessary and sumcient conditions for the energy norm convergence for iterative methods. Some illustrative examples for the conditions are also provided. The sharp convergence rate identity for the Gauss-Seidel method for the semidefinite system is obtained relying only on the pure matrix manipulations which guides us to obtain the convergence rate identity for the general successive subspace correction methods. The convergence rate identity for the successive subspace correction methods is obtained under the new conditions that the local correction schemes possess the local energy norm convergence. A convergence rate estimate is then derived in terms of the exact subspace solvers and the parameters that appear in the conditions. The uniform convergence of multigrid method for a model problem is proved by the convergence rate identity. The work can be regradled as unified and simplified analysis on the convergence of iteration methods for semidefinite problems [8, 9].