Strategies of model coupling: application to free surface flow problems

MOX 36

Strategies of model coupling: application to free surface flow problems

Friday 16th April 2004

Miglio, Edie; Perotto, Simona; Saleri, Fausto

The motion of water in a complex hydrodynamic configuration is characterized by a wide spectrum of space and time scales, due to coexistence of physical phenomena of different nature. Consequently, the numerical simulation of a hydrodynamic system of this type is characterized by a large computational cost. In this paper, after introducing a quite general setting for model coupling, we discuss two techniques to reduce such a computational effort by suitably coupling different hydrodynamic models. The first approach is based on a dimensionally heterogeneous-physically homogeneous coupling strategy driven a priori physical considerations. As second strategy we suggest a dimensionally homogeneous-physically heterogeneous coupling. This time the subdomain-to-model correspondence is identified automatically thanks to a suitable a posteriori modeling error estimator. The range of applicability of both the approaches is finally examined on some test cases.

This report, or a modified version of it, has been also submitted to, or published on
Miglio, E.; Perotto, S.; Saleri, F., Model coupling techniques for free-surface flow problems. Part I and Part II, Nonlinear Analysis, 63 (2005), no. 5-7, 1885-1896, and Nonlinear Analysis, 63 (2005), no. 5-7, 1897-1908