A regularized projection immersed boundary method for smooth boundary forces

The projection immersed boundary method calculates boundary forces (i.e., surface stresses) from velocity constraints without introducing additional timestep restrictions. However, the projection method generally fails to produce boundary forces that converge to the actual physical surface stresses when the grid is refined. In most cases, the boundary forces show spurious oscillation. This spurious oscillation is particularly violent when the Lagrangian-to-Eulerian grid spacing ratio is small. As a result, the traditional projection method may encounter problems in fluidstructural interaction (FSI) simulations where accurate boundary forces are needed. To address these challenges, we propose a regularized projection method using (generalized) Tikhonov regularization techniques. The regularized projection method yields smoother boundary force solutions that closely approximate the actual boundary force distributions for a wider range of Lagrangian-to-Eulerian grid spacing ratios. The boundary force shows first order convergence with properly chosen parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our approach through various test cases.