The immersed boundary method is one of the most useful computational methods in studying fluid structure interaction. On the other hand, the Immersed Boundary method is also known to require small time steps to maintain stability when solved with an explicit method. Many implicit or approximately implicit methods have been proposed in the literature to remove this severe time step stability constraint, but none of them give satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient semi-implicit scheme to remove this stiffness from the immersed boundary method for the Navier–Stokes equations. The construction of our semi-implicit scheme consists of two steps. First, we obtain a semiimplicit discretization which is proved to be unconditionally stable. This unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme is still quite expensive to implement in practice. Next, we apply the small scale decomposition to the unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme to construct our efficient semi-implicit scheme. Unlike other implicit or semi-implicit schemes proposed in the literature, our semi-implicit scheme can be solved explicitly in the spectral space. Thus the computational cost of our semi-implicit schemes is comparable to that of an explicit scheme. Our extensive numerical experiments show that our semiimplicit scheme has much better stability property than an explicit scheme. This offers a substantial computational saving in using the immersed boundary method.

We consider compact submanifolds of dimension n  2 in Rn+k, with nonzero mean curvature vector everywhere, and such that the full norm of the second fundamental form is bounded by a fixed multiple (depending on n) of the length of the mean curvature vector at every point. We prove that the mean curvature flow deforms such a submanifold to a point in finite time, and that the solution is asymptotic to a shrinking sphere in some (n + 1)- dimensional affine subspace of Rn+k.

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In this work, we study the unsteady axisymmetric mixed convection boundary layer flow and heat transfer of non-Newtonian power law fluid over a cylinder. Different from most classical works, the temperature dependent variable fluid viscosity and thermal conductivity are taken into account in highly coupled velocity and temperature fields. The motion of the fluid can be modeled by a time-dependent nonlinear parabolic system in cylindrical coordinates, which is solved numerically by using Chebyshev spectral method along with the strong stability preserving (SSP) third order Runge-Kutta time discretization. We apply the numerical solver to problems with different power law indices, viscosity parameter, thermal conductivity parameter and Richardson numbers, and compute up to the steady state. The numerical solver is checked by testing the spectral convergence of the numerical approximation to a smooth exact solution of the PDEs with source terms. Moreover, the combined effects of pertinent physical parameters on the flow and heat transfer characteristics are analyzed in detail.

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