On energy conservation for finite element approximation of flow-induced airfoil vibrations

In this paper the numerical approximation of a two-dimensional fluid–structure interaction problem is addressed. The fully coupled formulation of incompressible viscous fluid flow interacting with a flexibly supported airfoil is considered. The flow is described by the incompressible system of Navier–Stokes equations, where large values of the Reynolds number are considered. The Navier–Stokes equations are spatially discretized by the finite element method and stabilized with a modification of the Galerkin Least Squares (GLS) method; cf. T. Gelhard, G. Lube, M.A. Olshanskii, J.-H. Starcke, Stabilized finite element schemes with LBB-stable elements for incompressible flows, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics 177 (2005) 243–267]. The motion of the computational domain is treated with the aid of Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) method and the stabilizing terms are modified in a consistent way with the ALE formulation.