On the order of accuracy of the immersed boundary method: Higher order convergence rates for sufficiently smooth problems

The immersed boundary method is both a mathematical formulation and a numerical scheme for problems involving the interaction of a viscous incompressible fluid and a (visco-)elastic structure. In [M.-C. Lai, Simulations of the flow past an array of circular cylinders as a test of the immersed boundary method, Ph.D. thesis, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, 1998; M.-C. Lai, C.S. Peskin, An immersed boundary method with formal second-order accuracy and reduced numerical viscosity, J. Comput. Phys. 160 (2000) 705-719], Lai and Peskin introduced a formally second order accurate immersed boundary method, but the convergence properties of their algorithm have only been examined computationally for problems with nonsmooth solutions. Consequently, in practice only first order convergence rates have been observed. In the present work, we describe a new formally second order accurate immersed boundary method and demonstrate its performance for a prototypical fluid-structure interaction problem, involving an immersed viscoelastic shell of finite thickness, studied over a broad range of Reynolds numbers. We consider two sets of material properties for the viscoelastic structure, including a case where the material properties of the coupled system are discontinuous at the fluid-structure interface. For both sets of material properties, the true solutions appear to possess sufficient smoothness for the method to converge at a second order rate for fully resolved computations.