Motivated by fluid-structure-interaction (FSI) phenomena in life sciences (e.g., erythrocytes moving in flowing blood), we consider a simple FSI model problem --- interaction of an elastic plate (fixed at the midline) with a non-Newtonian fluid flow in three dimensions. The constitutive equation of the non-Newtonian flow is modeled by power-law functions. The fluid flow is modeled by the lattice Boltzmann equations. The deformable structure and the fluid-structure interaction are handled by the immersed boundary (IB) method. Drag of the plate is computed, drag scaling is studied, and effects of several dimensionless parameters including exponent of the power laws, Reynolds number, and plate bending modulus on drag and its scaling are investigated. An interactive implementation of the algorithm on two GPUs are also presented.

Professor Zhu received his PhD degree in applied mathematics from Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University (USA) in 2001. He was a Postdoc in University of California Santa Barbara from 2001 to 2004. Then he joined Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, as a Assistant Professor, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010. His current research interests include modeling and simulation of blood flows, modeling and simulation of fluid flow over osteocyte, numerical methods for fluid structure interaction and scientific computing.