In this study, a combination of the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and finite element method (FEM) solving the complex problem of interaction between fluid with free surface and an elastic structure is studied. A brief description of SPH and FEM is presented. Contact mechanics is used for the coupling between fluid and structure, which are simulated with SPH and FEM, respectively. In the proposed method, to couple mesh-free and mesh-based methods, fluid and structure are solved together by a complete stiffness matrix instead of iterative predictive–corrective or master–slave methods. In addition, fully dynamic large-deformation analysis is carried out in FEM by taking into account mass and damping of the elastic structure. Accordingly, a two-dimensional fluid–structure interaction (FSI) code is developed and validated with two different experiments available in the literature. The results of the numerical method are in good agreement with the experiments. In addition, a novel laboratory experiment on a dam break problem with elastic gate in which the length of the initial water column is larger than its height is conducted. The main difference between the previous experiments and the one conducted in this study is that an upward water motion parallel to the elastic gate is observed at the upstream side of the gate. This motion is captured with the numerical method.

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Liquid slug flow driven by pressurized air in an inclined pipe with a downstream elbow is investigated numerically. As the liquid slug hits the elbow, the impact pressure and the associated force generated at the elbow may damage pipe supports as well as the pipe itself. It is essential for the design engineers of pipeline systems to accurately predict the pressure trace during the impact for safe operation. The slug arrival velocity and slug length (i.e., mass) at the elbow directly affect that pressure. In order to calculate these slug parameters just before the impact, an improved one-dimensional (1D) model proposed in the literature is used. At the elbow, pressure variation with respect to time is calculated by a recently developed computer code which uses a two-dimensional (2D) smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. In the numerical setup, two representative initial slug lengths, one for short slugs and one for long slugs, and three different initial air tank pressures are used. The obtained numerical data are validated with available experimental results. For both short and long slugs, calculated peak pressures show great agreement with measured peak pressures.

Sloshing behavior due to near-fault type and earthquake excitations of a fluid in a tank having a highly deformable elastic structure in the middle was investigated experimentally and numerically in this paper. In the numerical model, fluid was simulated with smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and structure was simulated with the finite element method (FEM). The coupling was satisfied with contact mechanics. The δ-SPH scheme was adapted to lower the numerical oscillations. The proposed fluid-structure interaction (FSI) method can simulate the violent fluid-structure interaction problem successfully. The effects of near-fault type and earthquake excitations on free-surfaces of fluid and the elastic structure are presented.

In this study, a numerical model is proposed for the analysis of a simply supported structural cable. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH)—a mesh-free, Lagrangian method with advantages for analysis of highly deformable bodies—is utilized to model a cable. In the proposed numerical model, it is assumed that a cable has only longitudinal stiffness in tension. Accordingly, SPH equations derived for solid mechanics are adapted for a structural cable, for the first time. Besides, a proper damping parameter is introduced to capture the behavior of the cable more realistically. In order to validate the proposed numerical model, different experimental and numerical studies available in the literature are used. In addition, novel experiments are carried out. In the experiments, different harmonic motions are applied to a uniformly loaded cable. Results show that the SPH method is an appropriate method to simulate the structural cable.