Accurate wall shear stress estimation in point cloud based fluid simulations
Accurate wall shear stress in immersed flow analysis with application to point cloud-based CFD
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Summary
Simulating how fluids flow around objects is harder when using raw 3D scans because those scans aren't perfect shapes. The authors found a better way to calculate the tiny forces of fluid rubbing along surfaces (wall shear stress) directly from these 3D points without fixing the shape first. Their method improves accuracy by changing how they handle boundary conditions and recover stress information near surfaces. They tested it on standard cases and real-world examples like blood flow in an artery, showing it matches well with known results.
What this means in practice
- •For medical device designers: Use improved fluid simulations on scanned patient arteries to better predict wall shear stress impacting device performance and safety.
- •For automotive engineers: Simulate airflow over scanned car parts without complex mesh generation to optimize aerodynamic design by accurately capturing surface shear forces.
Authors
Monu Jaiswal, Ming-Chen Hsu
Abstract
Point cloud-based CFD enables flow analysis directly on discrete points obtained from 3D scanning and medical imaging, bypassing surface reconstruction, geometry cleanup, and boundary-fitted mesh generation. Derived from immersogeometric analysis, the method immerses the point cloud in a background mesh and enforces no-slip conditions on discrete points through a Nitsche-based weak boundary condition (BC). The framework delivers accurate velocity fields, pressure distribution, and integrated loads; however, accurate prediction of the local wall shear stress (WSS) has remained a critical challenge. The geometry intersects the background mesh arbitrarily, producing cut elements that lack the regularity required for consistent gradient evaluation. The issue is compounded by the stabilization term of the weak BC, whose parameter estimation in the symmetric Nitsche formulation is dependent on the cut configuration and affects the variationally consistent definition of traction from which the WSS is computed. In this work, we propose a new method to obtain accurate wall shear stress in immersed flow analysis with application to point cloud-based CFD, using a non-symmetric Nitsche's formulation with near-wall modeling and a patch-based stress recovery approach with traction compatibility. The method is validated on canonical benchmarks and applied to turbulent flow past a sphere and to a patient-specific aorta, showcasing excellent agreement with reference results.