Séance Séminaire

Séminaire ACSIOM

Contactless rebound of elastic bodies in a viscous incompressible fluid

In this talk, we discuss the phenomenon of particle rebound in a viscous incompressible fluid environment. We focus on the important case of no-slip boundary conditions, for which it is by now classical that, under certain assumptions, collisions cannot occur in finite time. Motivated by the desire to understand this fascinating yet counter-intuitive fluid-structure interaction, we introduce a reduced model. In this simplified framework, we provide conditions which allow to prove that rebound is possible even in the absence of a topological contact. Our results lead to conjecture that a qualitative change in the shape of the solid is necessary for obtaining a physically meaningful rebound. We support the conjecture by also comparing numerical simulations performed for the reduced model with the finite element solutions obtained for the corresponding well-established PDE system.