Time Accurate Fluid-Structure Coupling Employing A Lightweight Socket Based Data Exchange

Abstract

A software library used for the fluid-structure coupling is presented. The library is designed to efficiently exchange data between two programs and uses a socket-based approach. Three different communication protocols are implemented. A synthetic test case is investigated to benchmark the performance of the library. It is shown that the socket based approach significantly increase the bandwidth of the communication compared to a file based approach. Afterwards a strong coupling scenario is presented where the library is used to couple the flow solver FLOWer to the multi-body-dynamics code SIMPACK. The results obtained are more realistic and the choice of protocol shows no significant impact on the overall simulation time. However, the library significantly reduces the programming effort for a new coupling framework and facilitates the entire coupling exchange with few API calls.