A mesh-constrained discrete point method for incompressible flows with moving boundaries

Particle-based methods are a practical tool in computational fluid dynamics, and novel types of methods have been proposed. However, widely developed Lagrangian-type formulations suffer from the nonuniform distribution of particles, which is enhanced over time and result in problems in computational efficiency and parallel computations. To mitigate these problems, a mesh-constrained discrete point (MCD) method was developed for stationary boundary problems (Matsuda et al., 2022). Although the MCD method is a meshless method that uses moving least-squares approximation, the arrangement of particles (or discrete points (DPs)) is specialized so that their positions are constrained in a background mesh to obtain a closely uniform distribution. This achieves a reasonable approximation for spatial derivatives with compact stencils without encountering any ill-posed condition and leads to good performance in terms of computational efficiency. In this study, a novel meshless method based on the MCD method for incompressible flows with moving boundaries is proposed. To ensure the mesh constraint of each DP in moving boundary problems, a novel updating algorithm for the DP arrangement is developed so that the position of DPs is not only rearranged but the DPs are also reassigned the role of being on the boundary or not. The proposed method achieved reasonable results in numerical experiments for well-known moving boundary problems. • Novel meshless method for incompressible fluid flows with moving boundaries based on the ALE formulation. • Uniform distribution of discrete points (or particles) using a mesh-constrained approach for moving boundaries. • Competitive with existing methods in several numerical examples for moving boundary problems.