Partitioned solution strategies for coupled BEM-FEM acoustic fluid-structure interaction problems

This paper investigates two FEM-BEM coupling formulations for acoustic fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems, using the Finite Element Method (FEM) to model the structure and the Boundary Element Method (BEM) to represent a linear acoustic fluid. The coupling methods described interconnect fluid and structure using classical or localized Lagrange multipliers, allowing the connection of non-matching interfaces. First coupling technique is the well known mortar method, that uses classical multipliers and is compared with a new formulation of the method of localized Lagrange multipliers (LLM) for PSI applications with non-matching interfaces. The proposed non-overlapping domain decomposition technique uses a classical non-symmetrical acoustic BEM formulation for the fluid, although a symmetric GalerIcin BEM formulation could be used as well. A comparison between the localized methodology and the mortar method in highly non conforming interface meshes is presented. Furthermore, the methodology proposes an iterative preconditioned and projected bi-conjugate gradient solver which presents very good scalability properties in the solution of this kind of problems. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.