Over the past decade, immersed boundary methods have been constantly expanding into new areas of fluid dynamics and related disciplines. A common feature of most computational tools based on immersed boundary methods is that the grid lines are not aligned with the body, which is usually immersed in a structured grid, and the boundary conditions are imposed using forcing functions or local reconstructions. The main reason for their success and constantly growing popularity comes from their straightforward implementation, which requires minimal changes to existing solvers developed for building block flows, enabling their application to many challenging problems in computational mechanics.

Since 2010, the Fluids Engineering Division of ASME has organized the Symposium on Development and Applications of Immersed Boundary Methods annually at the Fluids Engineering Summer Meeting. This special section consists of several invited papers and papers presented at the symposium held on July 8–12, 2012 in Puerto Rico. These...