Abstract

This talk will give an overview of our recent work on immersed boundary type finite element techniques. The unifying characteristic of immersed methods is that the physical problem is discretized using only a Cartesian grid with coordinate lines which do not in general conform to the domain boundaries. Relative to conventional finite elements, particularly those available in commercial software, immersed methods sidestep the burden of creating high-quality conforming meshes and are algorithmically easier to handle, especially on multi-core, multi-processor computing platforms. These benefits will be demonstrated with three specific applications: isogeometric analysis of CAD geometries, variational shape optimisation of solids and fluid-structure interaction in the context of insect flight.