Numerical study and improvement of the methods in Uintah framework: the Material Point Method and the Implicit Continuous-fluid Eulerian method

The Material Point Method (MPM) and the Implicit Continuous-fluid Eulerian method (ICE) have been used to simulate and solve many challenging problems in engineering applications, especially those involving large deformations in materials and multimaterial interactions. These methods were implemented within the Uintah Computational Framework (UCF) to simulate explosions, fires, and other fluids and fluid-structure interaction. For the purpose of knowing if the simulations represent the solutions of the actual mathematical models, it is important to fully understand the accuracy of these methods. At the time this research was initiated, there were hardly any error analysis being done on these two methods, though the range of their applications was impressive. This dissertation undertakes an analysis of the errors in computational properties of MPM and ICE in the context of model problems from compressible gas dynamics which are governed by the one-dimensional Euler system. The analysis for MPM includes the analysis of errors introduced when the information is projected from particles onto the grid and when the particles cross the grid cells. The analysis for ICE includes the analysis of spatial and temporal errors in the method, which can then be used to improve the method's accuracy in both space and time. The implementation of ICE in UCF, which is referred to as Production ICE, does not perform as well as many current methods for compressible flow problems governed by the one-dimensional Euler equations - which we know because the obtained numerical solutions exhibit unphysical oscillations and discrepancies in the shock speeds. By examining different choices in the implementation of ICE in this dissertation, we propose a method to eliminate the discrepancies and suppress the nonphysical oscillations in the numerical solutions of Production ICE - this improved Production ICE method (IMPICE) is extended to solve the multidimensional Euler equations. The discussion of the IMPICE method for multidimensional compressible flow problems includes the method's detailed implementation and embedded boundary implementation. Finally, we propose a discrete adjoint-based approach to estimate the spatial and temporal errors in the numerical solutions obtained from IMPICE.