An Immersed Interface Method for Incompressible Navier--Stokes Equations

The method developed in this paper is motivated by Peskin's immersed boundary (IB) method, and allows one to model the motion of flexible membranes or other structures immersed in viscous incompressible fluid using a fluid solver on a fixed Cartesian grid. The IB method uses a set of discrete delta functions to spread the entire singular force exerted by the immersed boundary to the nearby fluid grid points. Our method instead incorporates part of this force into jump conditions for the pressure, avoiding discrete dipole terms that adversely affect the accuracy near the immersed boundary. This has been implemented for the two-dimensional incompressible Navier--Stokes equations using a high-resolution finite-volume method for the advective terms and a projection method to enforce incompressibility. In the projection step, the correct jump in pressure is imposed in the course of solving the Poisson problem. This gives sharp resolution of the pressure across the interface and also gives better volume conservation than the traditional IB method. Comparisons between this method and the IB method are presented for several test problems. Numerical studies of the convergence and order of accuracy are included.