An Embedded Boundary Approach for Resolving the Contribution of Cable Subsystems to Fully Coupled Fluid-Structure Interaction
Many engineering systems contain cables as subsystems including suspension lines for parachutes, cables in suspended bridges, risers in offshore platforms, airborne refueling systems, and so on. However, the interactions between fluid and cable subsystems receive little attention in the open literature. This work proposes an embedded surface approach, in which the dynamics of the cable is captured by beam elements typically found in finite element structural models, and the geometry of the cable is represented by an embedded surface. It is built on: master/slave kinematics between beam elements (master), and the embedded surface (slave); a highly accurate algorithm for computing the embedded surface displacement based on the beam displacement; and an energy-conserving method for transferring distributed forces and moments acting on the nodes of the discrete surface to beam elements. Hence, both flow-induced forces on the cable and effect of the structural dynamic response of the cable on the nearby flow are taken into account. Moreover, the proposed model can be easily incorporated in the Eulerian computation framework, which enables handling large deformations of the cable subsystem. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated using a model airborne refueling system and a challenging supersonic parachute inflation problem.
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