Suspended fibres significantly alter fluid rheology, as exhibited in for example solutions of DNA, RNA and synthetic biological nanofibres. It is of interest to determine how this altered rheology affects flow stability. Motivated by the fact thermal gradients may occur in biomolecular analytic devices, and recent stability results, we examine the problem of Rayleigh–Bénard convection of the transversely isotropic fluid of Ericksen. A transversely isotropic fluid treats these suspensions as a continuum with an evolving preferred direction, through a modified stress tensor incorporating four viscosity-like parameters. We consider the linear stability of a stationary, passive, transversely isotropic fluid contained between two parallel boundaries, with the lower boundary at a higher temperature than the upper. To determine the marginal stability curves the Chebyshev collocation method is applied, and we consider a range of initially uniform preferred directions, from horizontal to vertical, and three orders of magnitude in the viscosity-like anisotropic parameters. Determining the critical wave and Rayleigh numbers, we find that transversely isotropic effects delay the onset of instability; this effect is felt most strongly through the incorporation of the anisotropic shear viscosity, although the anisotropic extensional viscosity also contributes. Our analysis confirms the importance of anisotropic rheology in the setting of convection.

The present paper follows our previous work [Yang et al., Phys. Rev. E, 90 (2014), 063011] in which the bending modes of a symmetric flexible fiber in viscous flows were studied by using a coupling approach of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and element bending group (EBG). It was shown that a symmetric flexible fiber can undergo four different bending modes including stable U-shape, slight swing, violent flapping and stable closure modes. For an asymmetric flexible fiber, the bending modes can be different. This paper numerically studies the fiber shape, flow field and fluid drag of an asymmetric flexible fiber immersed in a viscous fluid flow by using the SPH-EBG coupling method. An asymmetric number is defined to describe the asymmetry of a flexible fiber. The effects of the asymmetric number on the fiber shape, flow field and fluid drag are investigated.

Almost all schemes existed in the literature to solve the Lattice Boltzmann Equation like stream & collide, finite difference, finite element, finite volume schemes are explicit. However, it is known fact that implicit methods utilizes better stability and faster convergence compared to the explicit methods. In this paper, a method named herein as Implicit Finite Volume Lattice Boltzmann Method (IFVLBM) for incompressible laminar and turbulent flows is proposed and it is applied to some 2D benchmark test cases given in the literature. Alternating Direction Implicit, an approximate factorization method is used to solve the obtained algebraic system. The proposed method presents a very good agreement for all the validation cases with the literature data. The proposed method shows good stability characteristics, the CFL number is eased. IFVLBM has about 2 times faster convergence rate compared with Implicit-Explicit Runge Kutta method even though it possesses a computational burden from the solution of algebraic systems of equations.

The motion and rotation of an ellipsoidal particle inside square tubes and rectangular tubes with the confinement ratio R/a∈(1.0,4.0) are studied by the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), where R and a are the radius of the tube and the semi-major axis length of the ellipsoid, respectively. The Reynolds numbers (Re) up to 50 are considered. For the prolate ellipsoid inside square and rectangular tubes, three typical stable motion modes which depend on R/a are identified, namely, the kayaking mode, the tumbling mode, and the log-rolling mode are identified for the prolate spheroid. The diagonal plane strongly attracts the particle in square tubes with 1.2≤R/a<3.0. To explore the mechanism, some constrained cases are simulated. It is found that the tumbling mode in the diagonal plane is stable because the fluid force acting on the particle tends to diminish the small displacement and will bring it back to the plane. Inside rectangular tubes the particle will migrate to a middle plane between short walls instead of the diagonal plane. Through the comparisons between the initial unstable equilibrium motion state and terminal stable mode, it is seems that the particle tend to adopt the mode with smaller kinetic energy.

This paper presents a numerical study of the sensitivity of a fluid model known as time relaxation model with respect to variations of the time relaxation coefficient χ. The sensitivity analysis of this model is utilized by the sensitivity equation method and uses the finite element method along with Crank Nicolson method in the fully discretization of the partial differential equations. We present a test case in support of the sensitivity convergence and also provide a numerical comparison between two different strategies of computing the sensitivity, sensitivity equation method and forward finite differences.

In this study, the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) is implemented through a finite-volume approach to perform 2-D, incompressible, and turbulent fluid flow analyses on structured grids. Even though the approach followed in this study necessitates more computational effort compared to the standard LBM (the so called stream and collide scheme), using the finite-volume method, the known limitations of the stream and collide scheme on lattice to be uniform and Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) number to be one are removed. Moreover, the curved boundaries in the computational domain are handled more accurately with less effort. These improvements pave the way for the possibility of solving fluid flow problems with the LBM using coarser grids that are refined only where it is necessary and the boundary layers might be resolved better.

This paper presents a method for solving the linear semi-implicit immersed boundary equations which avoids the severe time step restriction presented by explicit-time methods. The Lagrangian variables are eliminated via a Schur complement to form a purely Eulerian saddle point system, which is preconditioned by a projection operator and then solved by a Krylov subspace method. From the viewpoint of projection methods, we derive an ideal preconditioner for the saddle point problem and compare the efficiency of a number of simpler preconditioners that approximate this perfect one. For low Reynolds number and high stiffness, one particular projection preconditioner yields an efficiency improvement of the explicit IB method by a factor around thirty. Substantial speed-ups over explicit-time method are achieved for Reynolds number below 100. This speedup increases as the Eulerian grid size and/or the Reynolds number are further reduced.

This paper investigates the chaotic lid-driven square cavity flows at extreme Reynolds numbers. Several observations have been made from this study. Firstly, at extreme Reynolds numbers two principles add at the genesis of tiny, loose counterclockwise- or clockwise-rotating eddies. One concerns the arousing of them owing to the influence of the clockwise- or counterclockwise currents nearby; the other, the arousing of counterclockwise-rotating eddies near attached to the moving (lid) top wall which moves from left to right. Secondly, unexpectedly, the kinetic energy soon reaches the qualitative temporal limit’s pace, fluctuating briskly, randomly inside the total kinetic energy range, fluctuations which concentrate on two distinct fragments: one on its upper side, the upper fragment, the other on its lower side, the lower fragment, switching briskly, randomly from each other; and further on many small fragments arousing randomly within both, switching briskly, randomly from one another. As the Reynolds number Re → ∞, both distance and then close, and the kinetic energy fluctuates shorter and shorter at the upper fragment and longer and longer at the lower fragment, displaying tall high spikes which enlarge and then disappear. As the time t → ∞ (at the Reynolds number Re fixed) they recur from time to time with roughly the same amplitude. For the most part, at the upper fragment the leading eddy rotates clockwise, and at the lower fragment, in stark contrast, it rotates counterclockwise. At Re=109 the leading eddy — at its qualitative temporal limit’s pace — appears to rotate solely counterclockwise.

Explicit time stepping schemes for the immersed boundary method require very small time steps in order to maintain stability. Solving the equations that arise from an implicit discretization is difficult. Recently, several different approaches have been proposed, but a complete understanding of this problem is still emerging. A multigrid method is developed and explored for solving the equations in an implicit-time discretization of a model of the immersed boundary equations. The model problem consists of a scalar Poisson equation with conformation-dependent singular forces on an immersed boundary. This model does not include the inertial terms or the incompressibility constraint. The method is more efficient than an explicit method, but the efficiency gain is limited. The multigrid method alone may not be an effective solver, but when used as a preconditioner for Krylov methods, the speed-up over the explicit-time method is substantial. For example, depending on the constitutive law for the boundary force, with a time step 100 times larger than the explicit method, the implicit method is about 15-100 times more efficient than the explicit method. A very attractive feature of this method is that the efficiency of the multigrid preconditioned Krylov solver is shown to be independent of the number of immersed boundary points.

The problem of stagnation point flow with heat transfer of an electrically conducting fluid impinging normally on a permeable axisymmetric surface in the presence of a uniform transverse magnetic field is analysed. The governing nonlinear differential equations and their associated boundary conditions are reduced to dimensionless form using suitable similarity transformations. Comparison with previously published work shows good agreement. Effects of the injection–suction parameter, magnetic parameter and Prandtl number on the flow and thermal fields are presented. The investigations show that the wall shear stress and heat transfer rate from the surface increase with increased applied magnetic field. An increase in the velocity and thermal boundary layer thicknesses is observed with an increase in the wall injection, while the velocity and thermal boundary layers become thinner when increasing the wall suction and applied magnetic field.

The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) with an elastic model is applied to the simulation of two-phase flows containing a deformable body with a viscoelastic membrane. The numerical method is based on the LBM for incompressible two-phase fluid flows with the same density. The body has an internal fluid covered by a viscoelastic membrane of a finite thickness. An elastic model is introduced to the LBM in order to determine the elastic forces acting on the viscoelastic membrane of the body. In the present method, we take account of changes in surface area of the membrane and in total volume of the body as well as shear deformation of the membrane. By using this method, we calculate two problems, the behavior of an initially spherical body under shear flow and the motion of a body with initially spherical or biconcave discoidal shape in square pipe flow. Calculated deformations of the body (the Taylor shape parameter) for various shear rates are in good agreement with other numerical results. Moreover, tank-treading motion, which is a characteristic motion of viscoelastic bodies in shear flows, is simulated by the present method.

The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for multicomponent immiscible fluids is applied to the simulations of solid-fluid mixture flows including spherical or non-spherical particles in a square pipe at Reynolds numbers of about 100. A spherical solid particle is modeled by a droplet with strong interfacial tension and large viscosity, and consequently there is no need to track the moving solid-liquid boundary explicitly. Nonspherical (discoid, flat discoid, and biconcave discoid) solid particles are made by applying artificial forces to the spherical droplet. It is found that the spherical particle moves straightly along a stable position between the wall and the center of the pipe (the Segré-Silberberg effect). On the other hand, the biconcave discoid particle moves along a periodic helical path around the center of the pipe with changing its orientation, and the radius of the helical path and the polar angle of the orientation increase as the hollow of the concave becomes large.

We define a family of generalizations of the two-variable quandle polynomial. These polynomial invariants generalize in a natural way to eight-variable polynomial invariants of finite biquandles. We use these polynomials to define a family of link invariants that further generalize the quandle counting invariant.

The equation modelling the evolution of a foam (a complex porous medium consisting of a set of gas bubbles surrounded by liquid films) is solved numerically. This model is described by the reaction–diffusion differential equation with a free boundary. Two numerical methods, namely the fixed-point and the averaging in time and forward differences in space (the Crank–Nicolson scheme), both in combination with Newton’s method, are proposed for solving the governing equations. The solution of Burgers’ equation is considered as a special case. We present the Crank–Nicolson scheme combined with Newton’s method for the reaction–diffusion differential equation appearing in a foam breaking phenomenon.