Artificial boundary method for the exterior Stokes flow in three dimensions

In this paper, the artificial boundary method is considered for the numerical simulation of the exterior Stokes flow in three dimensions. First, an exact relation between the normal stress and the velocity field is obtained on a spherical artificial boundary. With the relation specified on the artificial boundary, the original problem is reduced to a new one only defined on a finite domain. After that, an variational problem equivalent to the reduced problem is derived. By truncating the series term in the formulation, a sequence of approximate variational problems are obtained, which can then be solved with a suitable finiteelement scheme. Finally, a numerical example is presented to show the performance of the method.