PAMM Proc. Appl. Math. Mech. 5, 1922 (2005) / DOI 10.1002/pamm.

200510006

Coupling Techniques for Thermal and Mechanical

Fluid-Structure-Interactions in Aeronautics
Matthias Haupt , Reinhold Niesner, Ralf Unger, and Peter Horst
Institute for Aircraft Design and Lightweight Structures, Technical University Braunschweig,
Hermann-Blenk-Str. 35, D-38108 Braunschweig
For the coupled thermal and mechanical analysis of spacecraft structures a simulation environment was developed containing
the necessary coupling techniques. The numerical concept uses the weak form of the interface conditions on the coupling
surface. The iterative solution of the coupled equations is based on the classical Dirichlet-Neumann approach. Transient
problems are handled with iterative staggered schemes. A exible component-based software environment combines existing
uid and structural analysis codes. Aspects of the architecture and its implementation are described. Finally an application to
a spacecraft structure is shown.
2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

1 Introduction
Fluid-structure-interactions gain in importance more and more for industrial applications. The target is to reach the design
limits by careful analyses. The coupled thermal-mechanical analysis of uid-structure interactions is the challenge for the
progressive design and analysis and the coupling of monodisciplinary codes for structural and uid analysis becomes one of
the key problems. This paper presents the elements required for coupled simulations with well-established codes for uid and
structural analysis in aeronautics: a numerical concept to handle nonconforming grids on the coupling surface and to solve the
stationary or transient equations and a software concept providing these techniques in a comfortable and exible environment.
Especially, the thermal-mechanical coupling arise in the area of spacecraft, launcher, and reentry vehicles, which is the context
of the concrete application and this development.

2 Numerical Elements
2.1 Nonconforming Grids
The general approach to handle different discretizations on the coupling interface of the uid and structural domain is the
weak formulation of the continuity conditions [1]. The three-eld approach uses a weak trace of the state variables z i of
the uid and structural domain (i = f resp. s) on introducing the Lagrange multipliers i and an additional state (frame)
variable z [2]. A discrete formulation of continuity conditions is then derived containing the coupling matrices M z(i) :

i (zi z)d = 0 i = f, s

Mzi zi = Mz z
with Mz(i) =
N Nz(i) d .
(1)

The Lagrange multiplier has the physical meaning of a ux (traction forces) gluing the subdomains together. The shape
functions N and Nz for i and z may be chosen independently under the requirements of the existence and uniqueness
of the solution of the hybrid formulation of the coupled system. Choosing z = z s | simplies the restriction and only one
Lagrange multiplier remains resulting in the two-eld formulation. Because of its numerical simplicity in the application to
uid-structure-interaction it is used here. Taking delta functions at the uid nodes as shape functions the integral vanishes and
the continuity condition changes to the evaluation of the structural shape functions at the uid points. This is the common
simple state interpolation technique, which is part of the MpCCI library [3]. The transfer of nodal loads is constructed by the
transposed relation between the interface states of the subdomain to ensure the conservation of energy resp. work:
T

ff = z
z
f
s

fs

and

u
f = Pus

fs = PT ff .

(2)

The coupling matrix P gives the explicit relation between the interface states and may be derived from the implicit form (1).
Choosing the shape functions of the uid domain for the Lagrange multiplier - that is the standard here - the load transfer is
equivalent to the conservative scheme of [4]. The adaptive mesh renement during numerical integration of [4] is used for the
evaluation of the coupling matrices Mz(i) for accuracy reasons. Distributed Lagrange multipliers with a precise integration
are required to obtain smooth target distributions of state and ux transfers [5]. The accurate common renement technique
of [6] requires more effort, but shows no real benet within the application examples.

Corresponding author: e-mail: m.haupt@tu-bs.de, Phone: +00 49 531 3919917, Fax: +00 49 531 3919904
2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

Minisymposium M5

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2.2 Equilibrium Iteration and Time Integration

Due to the requirement to use existing analysis codes, a monolithic solution of the coupled equations is not feasible. In order
to solve the nonlinear coupled equations as basic iteration scheme, the classical Dirichlet-Neumann iteration - the sequence of
interface ux calculation through the uid problem followed by the state calculation through the structural problem - is used.
(k+1)
The new interface state - dened here by the structural degrees of freedom u s
- is calculated by a relaxation from the
(k)
s :
old state us and the result of one Dirichlet-Neumann step u
 s(k+1) = us(k) + d(k)
= (1 ) u(k)
+ u
.
u(k+1)
s
s
s

(3)

A choice of 0.75-0.85 for the relaxation factor leads to a reasonable reduction of the residuum during the iterations in the
considered thermal-mechanical examples. A determination of during each iteration can be done through the extension of
the Gradient method [7]. The Block-Newton method [8] has shown comparable properties with a theoretical second order
convergence rate. In both cases, a Dirichlet and a Neumann problem has to be solved twice in an iteration. The efciency
benet of a better value for is compensated in the most cases of the applications shown below. Nevertheless, a single initial
calculation of gives a good guess to be used in further coupling steps.
An useful acceleration is obtained by an approximation of the Schur-complement S f of the uid domain for thermal
coupling. In this case the uid heat ux qf is linearised in the form of convective heat transfer:
f (Tf Tad ) = qf .

Sf (zf ) = ff :

(4)

The heat transfer coefcient f and the adiabatic wall temperature Tad are evaluated from the solution of the boundary layer
during the postprocessing. With this relation the expensive uid analysis can be replaced for some iteration steps assuming
small changes in the ow conditions [9].
For transient analyses of uid-structure problems, staggered coupling schemes are applied [7, 10]. The time integration
from time t to t + dt (time level n to n + 1) is shown schematically in Fig. 1. The excecution of steps 1 (predictor with
different order), 2 (uid analysis with the boundary conditions for t + t including the grid-update for deforming structures),
3 (ux transfer), and 4 (structural analysis with optional subcycling for large coupling-timesteps) for each time step results in
the simple staggered algorithm often refered to as loose coupling. Appending the sequence of steps 5 to 8 repeatedly leads to
the iterative staggered algorithms with a strong coupled solution, which in general is applied here due to the nonlinearities.
The PID-controller-law technique proposed in [11] is used as essential criterion to determine the variable timestep-size.

n+1

u0
time

n
s

f1

f0
3

t+ t

n+1

n+1

26

n
s

48

u1

3 7 t+ t
5

n+1 1
s

Fig. 1 Time integration scheme for the coupled system.

3 Software Integration
The dataow for the uid-structure-interaction computation is given in Fig. 2. The basic blocks are the solvers for the
structural analysis - currently the commerical nite element codes MSC/NASTRAN and ANSYS - and for the uid analysis
including the grid deformation - the unstructured grid code TAU from DLR and for nozzle problems DavisVol from EADSST. These are combined by the state and ux transfer operations, which access the tranfers matrices build in the projection
and integration phase accessing the surface grids. The computing sequence is completed by the nonlinear iteration control
respectively the time stepping algorithm.
Target of the corresponding software design and implementation work was to achieve a exible simulation environment
with a high-level modularity for the development of algorithms and for different simulation scenarios. All the mentioned block
are implemented as components in the dataow environment is [12], which is very useful for the simulation setup and for
debugging due to the integrated visualization and interactive steering capabilities. For high performance computing reasons
2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

PAMM Proc. Appl. Math. Mech. 5 (2005)

21
Structural
Grid

server:
distributed environment

FluxTransfer

MPI/MpCCI
Iteration control
Time stepping

q, p

ControlCode

Projection
Integration

Interpolation

q, p
Flux

Structural
Analysis

AnsCP

FluidAnalysis

T, u
State

Python
Interpreter

ANSYS

Transfer

x
State
Transfer

Fluid
Grid

TauCP

T, u

Tau

ifls:
process logic

Fig. 2 The dataow of uid-structure-interaction and its implementation.

these blocks are also available in an MPI-based architecture, which allows the execution in a distributed or parallel computing
environment. For compatability reasons the coupling library MpCCI is supported and can be used for the interpolation and
communication between the components. The simulation codes are attached to this environment with so-called coprocesses
(CP) providing a standard interface to the different codes within this environment.
The complete simulation is controlled by the ControlCode, which is based on a Python interpreter. The object-oriented
scripting language Python is very powerful and for a user it is very easy to implement the coupling procedure from the existing
blocks. The following code fragment shows the implementation of the Dirichlet-Neumann iteration and shall demonstrate
the high level of abstraction. All described coupling algorithms (e.g. staggered coupling schemes) are available as similar
scripts. FluidCode and StructCode are instances of analysis code classes, FluxFluid, FluxStruct, TempFluidOld, TempFluid
and TempStruct represent the ux and state vectors on the interface.
for i in range(numberOfIterations):
#
# --- send/receive Flux from FluidCode to StructCode:
FluidCode.SendInterfaceQuantity(FluxFluid, StructCode)
StructCode.ReceiveInterfaceQuantity(FluxStruct, FluidCode)
#
# --- solve structure:
StructCode.SetBCQuantity(FluxStruct)
StructCode.Solve(1, ())
StructCode.GetResultQuantity(TempStruct)
#
# --- send/receive Temperature from StructCode to FluidCode:
StructCode.SendInterfaceQuantity(TempStruct, FluidCode)
FluidCode.ReceiveInterfaceQuantity(TempFluid, StructCode)
#
# --- Relaxation and copy TempFluid to TempFluidOld:
TempFluid = (1-f)* TempFluidOld + f* TempFluid
TempFluidOld = TempFluid.copy()
#
# --- solve fluid:
FluidCode.SetBCQuantity(TempFluid)
FluidCode.Solve(1, ())
FluidCode.GetResultQuantity(FluxFluid)

2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

Minisymposium M5

22

The interpolation of the interface variables from one grid to the other is done implicitly by the MpCCI library during the send
and receive-commands. Other transfer techniques (e.g. hybride techniques) are available as separate components, which need
only the MPI communication library so that the MpCCI library can be bypassed completely.

4 Application
For the 2D nose-cap model depicted in Fig. 3, a transient thermal-mechanical coupled analysis has been performed to validate
the coupling environment with wind-tunnel experiments [13]. The outer structure is made of a single C/C-SiC shell with
constant thickness mounted at the bottom. This shell is lled with insulating material. The left part shows the temperature
distribution on the uid and on the structural grid and additional isothermals in the structure ( T = 100K ) for the stationary
state. The analysis has been performed using the Navier-Stokes code TAU and the FEM-code ANSYS. For the time integration
of the coupled system the iterative staggered scheme has been used with a transient solution on the structural side and a steadystate solution for the uid eld. The left part of Fig. 3 illustrate the deections of the coupling surface drawn with a scaling
factor of 10. Due to the temperature increase and the orthotropic thermal expansion, the shell bends up because of the tendency
to increase the radius of curvature in the vicinity of the stagnation point. The aerodynamic pressure deforms the plate in the
opposite direction. For further details of the 3D results and experiments see [13]. Other applications demonstrating the
algorithmic properties of the implemented techniques are given e.g. in [5].

free stream
direction
pure thermal deflection
thermal-mechanical coupling
undeformed state
deformations scaled 10x
fixed, isotherm

Fig. 3 Temperature distribution of the 2D nosecap model.

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2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim