Published 6 issues per year
ISSN Print: 1543-1649
ISSN Online: 1940-4352
Indexed in
Efficient Computation of Fluid Drag Forces on Micromachined Devices Using a Boundary Integral Equation-Based Approach
ABSTRACT
In this article, we report several techniques for improving the efficiency and accuracy of a precorrected fast Fourier transform (FFT)-accelerated solver for the computation of fluid drag forces on micromachined devices using a boundary element discretization of the integral form of the incompressible Stokes flow equations. The boundary element formulation necessitates the discretization of the surface of the device using a large number of "panels," whose interactions are coupled by multidimensional Stokes kernels. The resulting "n-body" problem generates dense matrices that can be solved in O(n log n) complexity using a precorrected FFT approach, where n is the number of panels used in discretizing the surface of the device.