Quadrature rules for boundary integral methods applied to Stokes flow

Sammanfattning:  Fluid phenomena dominated by viscous effects can, in many cases, be modeled by the Stokes equations. The boundary integral form of the Stokes equations reduces the number of degrees of freedom in a numerical discretization by reformulating the threedimensional problem to two-dimensional integral equations to be discretized over the boundaries of the domain. Hence for the study of objects immersed in a fluid, such as drops or elastic or solid particles, integral equations are to be discretized over the surfaces of these objects only. As outer boundaries or confinements are added these must also be included in the formulation. This work is focused on the development and validation of such a wall treatment. An inherent difficulty in the numerical treatment of boundary integrals for Stokes flow is the integration of the singular fundamental solution of the Stokes equations – the so called Stokeslet. To alleviate this problem we developed a set of high-order quadrature rules for the numerical integration of the Stokeslet over a flat surface. Such a quadrature rule was first designed for singularities of the type 1/|x|. To assess the convergence properties of this quadrature rule a theoretical analysis has been performed. The slightly more complicated singularity of the Stokeslet required certain modifications of the integration rule developed for 1/|x|. To validate the quadrature rule developed for the Stokeslet against a physical model we use it in a classical problem in fluid dynamics, the sedimentation of a sphere onto a flat plate. This involves a direct discretization of the plane wall and at the same time of the immersed sphere. Without any special treatment the algebraic system given by the discrete problem is quite memory consuming since matrix blocks are full. By exploring the structure of the block matrices that build up the system we have found that the wall discretization leads to a matrix which is generated by only three of its columns. This information together with certain preconditioning considerations allowed us to use the Schur complement method thus leading to a less memory expensive solution to the algebraic system. As a final step it is shown that the numerical simulations match the analytical solution, within the limitations of the model. This wall treatment can be easily extended to the problem of two parallel walls, and it is also shown that the simulation is in good agreement with some known results for the two parallel walls problem.