Stability of finite difference discretizations of multi- physics interface conditions

Abstract. We consider multi-physics computations where the Navier-Stokes equations of compressible fluid flow on some parts of the computational domain are coupled to the equations of elasticity on other parts of the computational domain. The different subdomains are separated by well-defined interfaces. We consider time accurate com-putations resolving all time scales. For such computations, explicit time stepping is very efficient. We address the issue of discrete interface conditions between the two domains of different physics that do not lead to instability, or to a significant reduction of the stable time step size. Finding such interface conditions is non-trivial. We discretize the problem with high order centered difference approximations with summation by parts boundary closure. We derive L2 stable interface conditions for the linearized one dimensional discretized problem. Furthermore, we generalize the in-terface conditions to the full non-linear equations, and numerically demonstrate their stable and accurate performance on a simple model problem. The energy stable in-terface conditions derived here through symmetrization of the equations contain the interface conditions derived through normal mode analysis by Banks and Sjögreen in [7] as a special case. AMS subject classifications: 65M12, 35L60, 35L65