Coupling of membrane element with material point method for fluid-membrane interaction problems

This paper proposes a coupled particle-finite element method for fluid-membrane structure interaction problems. The material point method (MPM) is employed to model the fluid flow and the membrane element is used to model the membrane structure. The interaction between the fluid and the membrane structure is handled by a contact method, which is implemented on an Eulerian background grid. Several numerical examples, including membrane sphere interaction, water sphere impact and gas expansion problems, are studied to validate the proposed method. The numerical results show that the proposed method offers advantages of both MPM and finite element method, and it can be used to simulate fluid-membrane interaction problems.