The Computational Hydrodynamics and Biofluids Group at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory have been developing high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics and fluid-structure interaction models for simulating: blood flow through mechanical heart valves implanted in patient-specific anatomies; turbulent geophysical flows past wind and hydrokinetic turbines for the development of novel control systems to maximize power production and mitigate fatigue loads; development of a control co-design framework and deep learning based reduced order models for wind farm optimization; and sediment transport in rivers with natural and man-made structures. The numerical code solves the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in a curvilinear coordinate system. Solid bodies in the flow are modeled using a sharp-interface immersed boundary method for handling arbitrarily complex geometries and moving immersed bodies with local grid refinement. Fluid-structure interaction methodologies have been developed and validated for both loose and strongly coupled interactions. Two-phase flows interface is modeled using the level-set method. The computational code has been parallelized with MPI showing great scalability.
This research was featured on the MSI website in:
- January 2019: Incorporating Complex Terrain Features in a Model of a Wind Farm
- October 2018: An Improved Model for Simulating Wind Farms