Experimental and numerical investigation of fluid-structure interaction problems

Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) is a common engineering problem faced in many engineering application. Because of the nature of the phenomenon including nonlinearity and multi-physics, experimental and numerical studies in this field have great importance to determine the main characteristics of the problem. In this thesis study, a Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) problem including the interaction of freesurface flows with the elastic solid body was investigated experimentally and numerically. As the numerical model, the coupled Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)-Finite Element Method (FEM), where the fluid flow was modeled using SPH and the solid body was modeled using FEM, was used. At first, in order to determine the efficiency of SPH in modeling of free surface flows, an experiment of a classic dam-break problem was carried out. Following that, the SPH method was coupled with FEM and used to investigate a FSI problem. The efficiency of SPH-FEM method was investigated using time evolution of water level and deformation of the solid body at various points. While deformation of the solid body was obtained using image processing technique, the time evolution of water level was obtained using image processing technique and also ultrasonic distance sensor. When the experimental data are compared with the numerical results, it was seen that numerical results are generally in reasonable agreement with the experimental data.