Numerical simulation of the flow around a sphere using the immersed boundary method for low Reynolds numbers

In the immersed boundary methodology, the effect of a fluid/solid interface inside a flow can be modeled by a body force term added to the discretized Navier-Stokes Equations. Moreover, the immersed body and the fluid don't share the same domain. in fact, one uses a Cartesian mesh based computational domain to solve the flow equations and a Lagrangian mesh to define the interface of the body. This approach allows to move and/or to deform the body surface without remeshing the fluid grid since the meshes overlap each other without interference. In the present work, numerical simulations of the flow around a sphere were performed employing an in-house immersed boundary methodology named Virtual Physical Model [1]. The sphere boundary was represented by a Finite Element mesh and the flow domain was discretized by the Finite Volume Method. Parallel processing techniques were used to solve the system of equations originated from an implicit second-order time and space discretization algorithm. The presented results were compared against those from literature.