Abstract
We develop an overset-curvilinear immersed boundary (overset-CURVIB) method in a general non-inertial frame of reference to simulate a wide range of challenging biological flow problems. The method incorporates overset-curvilinear grids to efficiently handle multi-connected geometries and increase the resolution locally near immersed boundaries. Complex bodies undergoing arbitrarily large deformations may be embedded within the overset-curvilinear background grid and treated as sharp interfaces using the curvilinear immersed boundary (CURVIB) method (Ge and Sotiropoulos, Journal of Computational Physics, 2007). The incompressible flow equations are formulated in a general non-inertial frame of reference to enhance the overall versatility and efficiency of the numerical approach. Efficient search algorithms to identify areas requiring blanking, donor cells, and interpolation coefficients for constructing the boundary conditions at grid interfaces of the overset grid are developed and implemented using efficient parallel computing communication strategies to transfer information among sub-domains. The governing equations are discretized using a second-order accurate finite-volume approach and integrated in time via an efficient fractional-step method. Various strategies for ensuring globally conservative interpolation at grid interfaces suitable for incompressible flow fractional step methods are implemented and evaluated. The method is verified and validated against experimental data, and its capabilities are demonstrated by simulating the flow past multiple aquatic swimmers and the systolic flow in an anatomic left ventricle with a mechanical heart valve implanted in the aortic position.