Lattice Boltzmann approach for the fluid-structure interaction of a neo-Hookean medium

In this paper, a lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for the fluid-structure interaction of an incompressible neo-Hookean medium is proposed. The objective is to use the lattice Boltzmann method to model the fluid and the solid domains at the same time, and thus avoid coupling two solvers, one for the fluid and one for the structure. The specific case of a neo-Hookean incompressible medium allows us to use a Eulerian formulation for the structure problem, which resembles the Navier-Stokes equation. Then, a macroscopic multiphase equation can be used to model the fluid and structure problems together. Next, the LBM approach is deduced from this macroscopic multiphase formulation of the fluid-structure interaction problem. It consists in extending the LBM to the solid domain by adding a tensor term in the equilibrium function of the collision operator. The effect of the added tensor term is to cancel in the solid domain the viscous fluid constraints and add neo-Hookean constraints. Thus, only the third moment of the LBM is modified, the first two being conserved, and only the constraints in the macroscopic Navier-Stokes equation are changed. The LBM scheme obtained can then model the interaction of a fluid and a structure composed of an incompressible neo-Hookean medium with a single solver for the fluid and the solid. Two additional equations are used, one to track the fluid and solid domains with the Cahn-Hilliard equation, and the other to compute the solid displacement field by a finite-difference scheme. The proposed method is applied successfully on three cases from the literature.