Numerical aerodynamic simulation facility

Abstract

Critical to the advancement of computational aerodynamics capability is the ability to simulate flows about three-dimensional configurations that contain both compressible and viscous effects, including turbulence and flow separation at high Reynolds numbers. Analyses were conducted of two solution techniques for solving the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations describing the mean motion of a turbulent flow with certain terms involving the transport of turbulent momentum and energy modeled by auxiliary equations. The first solution technique is an implicit approximate factorization finite-difference scheme applied to three-dimensional flows that avoids the restrictive stability conditions when small grid spacing is used. The approximate factorization reduces the solution process to a sequence of three one-dimensional problems with easily inverted matrices. The second technique is a hybrid explicit/implicit finite-difference scheme which is also factored and applied to three-dimensional flows. Both methods are applicable to problems with highly distorted grids and a variety of boundary conditions and turbulence models.