Viscoelastic Immersed Boundary Methods for Zero Reynolds Number Flow

Abstract

The immersed boundary method has been extensively used to simulate the motion of elastic structures immersed in a viscous fluid. For some applications, such as modeling biological materials, capturing internal boundary viscosity is important. We present numerical methods for simulating Kelvin-Voigt and standard linear viscoelastic structures immersed in zero Reynolds number flow. We find that the explicit time immersed boundary update is unconditionally unstable above a critical boundary to fluid viscosity ratio for a Kelvin-Voigt material. We also show there is a severe time step restriction when simulating a standard linear boundary with a small relaxation time scale using the same explicit update. A stable implicit method is presented to overcome these computation challenges.