Squeezing a Fluid Domain Shut

There are some applications of fluid-structure interactions (FSI) where one may wish to have solid walls come together within a fluid domain, up until the point that fluid is no longer able to flow between them. This may be thought of a case of squeezing a fluid domain shut with solid walls. Normally, a finite element FSI domain that allows fluid flow cannot be completely squeezed shut, as this might lead to mesh inversion in the deformable fluid domain. To address this challenge, we employ the offset feature of the sliding elastic contact interface. Here, we create a sliding elastic contact interface between solid surfaces that are separated by a FSI domain: When these solid surfaces are squeezed together, the contact offset prevents them from coming directly into contact, thereby preventing inversion of the FSI domain mesh between those surfaces.
The corresponding case study on the FEBio Knowledgebase can be found by clicking on the following link.
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