A Stable Loosely-Coupled Dirichlet-Neumann Scheme for Fluid-Structure Interaction with Large Added-Mass

Abstract Solving fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems when the densities are similar (large added-mass), such as in hemodynamics, is challenging since the stability and convergence of the adopted numerical scheme could be compromised. In particular, while loosely coupled (LC) partitioned approaches are appealing due to their computational efficiency, the stability issues arising in high added-mass regimes limit their applicability. In this work, we present a new strongly-coupled (SC) partitioning strategy for the solution of the FSI problem, from which we derive a stable LC scheme based on Dirichlet and Neumann interface conditions. We analyse the convergence of the new SC scheme on a benchmark problem, demonstrating enhanced behaviour over the standard DN method for specific ranges of a parameter $$\alpha $$ α , without additional relaxation. Building on this, we introduce a new LC scheme by performing a single iteration per time step. Stability analysis on a benchmark problem proves that the proposed LC scheme is conditionally stable in large added-mass regimes, under a constraint on a parameter $$\alpha $$ α . Numerical experiments in hemodynamic settings confirm the theoretical results, demonstrating the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed schemes.