Dynamic Mesh Handling in preCICE

preCICE is a coupling library for partitioned multi-physics simulations. Partitioned means that preCICE couples existing programs capable of simulating a subpart of the complete physics involved in a simulation. This allows for the high flexibility that is needed to keep a decent time-to-solution for complex multi-physics scenarios.
In its current version, preCICE only allows the usage of static coupling meshes. The vertices of such meshes can only be defined once per coupled simulation(during the initialization of preCICE) and remain, as the name suggests, static during the simulation. Several coupling applications, however, require dynamic coupling meshes: meshes that can be altered in every timestep during a simulation: coupling of solvers which use dynamic adaptive meshes or dynamic load-balancing themselves or fluid-structure interaction with fluid solvers using a pure Eulerian framework.
In this project, we extend preCICE with a brute-force re-initialization feature. Users will be able to mark complete coupling meshes as invalid and re-define them in every timestep, followed by a re-initialization of the parallel communication pattern of preCICE. This procedure is expected to be a slow algorithm for many coupled applications. For surface-coupled applications with small coupling meshes compared to large internal meshes of the coupled solvers, the algorithm could, however, already be fast enough. Besides the implementation, the objective of this KONWIHR project is to carefully analyze under which conditions this procedure is fast enough and where the bottlenecks are. 

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Funded by KONWIHR.