Eulerian simulation of complex suspensions and biolocomotion in three dimensions

We present a numerical method specifically designed for simulating three-dimensional fluid–structure interaction (FSI) problems based on the reference map technique (RMT). The RMT is a fully Eulerian FSI numerical method that allows fluids and large-deformation elastic solids to be represented on a single fixed computational grid. This eliminates the need for meshing complex geometries typical in other FSI approaches and greatly simplifies the coupling between fluid and solids. We develop a three-dimensional implementation of the RMT, parallelized using the distributed memory paradigm, to simulate incompressible FSI with neo-Hookean solids. As part of our method, we develop a field extrapolation scheme that works efficiently in parallel. Through representative examples, we demonstrate the method’s suitability in investigating many-body and active systems, as well as its accuracy and convergence. The examples include settling of a mixture of heavy and buoyant soft ellipsoids, lid-driven cavity flow containing a soft sphere, and swimmers actuated via active stress.