Search NASASearch

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “spectral methods”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 91 records · Page 5

A spectral method determination of the first critical Rayleigh number for a low-Prandtl number crystal melt in a cylindrical container

The onset of laminar axisymmetric Rayleigh-Benard convection is investigated for a low-Prandtl number liquid metal in a cylindrical container. All surfaces are considered to be solid and no-slip. Two separate cases are examined for the thermal boundary conditions at the side wall, one with conducting and the other with insulated surface. The governing Boussinesq system is first perturbed and then simplified by introducing a Stokes stream function. Subsequently, a Chebyshev Galerkin spectral model is employed to reduce the simplified system to a system of first-order nonlinear ordinary differential equations. A local stability analysis determines the two values of the first critical Rayleigh number, Ra(sub cl), for the insulated and conducting side walls. As expected, the conducting Ra(sub cl) value of 2882.5 obtained from the present approach exceeded the corresponding insulated Ra(sub cl) value of 2331.6. For the insulated case, an earlier study using a different numerical approach suggests that Ra(sub cl) = 2261.9, while an experimental study measured Ra(sub cl) = 2700.

Dietz, C. M., Jr.

A spectral method for determining the percentage of live herbage material in clipped samples

A laboratory spectroradiometric method for the rapid determination of live/dead vegetation percentages from clipped grass samples has been developed and preliminarily tested. The method utilizes the red and photographic infrared reflectance or radiance differences between green vegetation and that of dead vegetation. Mixtures of green and dead material were found to have reflectances or radiances proportional to the percentage of green material present. This method offers the possibility that rapid live/dead spectroradiometric determinations may replace the tedious hand-sorting now generally in use for many situations.

Tucker, C. J.

A spectral method for determining the percentage of green herbage material in clipped samples

A laboratory radiometric method for the rapid determination of green and brown vegetation percentages in clipped grass samples has been developed and tested. The method uses red and photographic infrared radiance or reflectance differences between green and brown vegetation. Mixtures of green and brown material were found to have radiances or reflectances proportional to the percentage of green material present. This method may permit the use of rapid green/brown radiometric determinations to replace the tedious hand sorting now generally used. It may also have application in remote sensing of vegetation ground-truth work where the determination of dry green biomass in clipped samples is necessary.

Tucker, C. J.

On time discretizations for spectral methods

New methods are introduced for the time integration of the Fourier and Chebyshev methods of solution for dynamic differential equations. These methods are unconditionally stable, even though no matrix inversions are required. Time steps are chosen by accuracy requirements alone. For the Fourier method both leapfrog and Runge-Kutta methods are considered. For the Chebyshev method only Runge-Kutta schemes are tested. Numerical calculations are presented to verify the analytic results. Applications to the shallow water equations are presented.

Gottlieb, D.

Spectral methods in time for hyperbolic equations

A pseudospectral numerical scheme for solving linear, periodic, hyperbolic problems is described. It has infinite accuracy both in time and in space. The high accuracy in time is achieved without increasing the computational work and memory space which is needed for a regular, one step explicit scheme. The algorithm is shown to be optimal in the sense that among all the explicit algorithms of a certain class it requires the least amount of work to achieve a certain given resolution. The class of algorithms referred to consists of all explicit schemes which may be represented as a polynomial in the spatial operator.

Tal-Ezer, H.

Fourier-Legendre spectral methods for incompressible channel flow

An iterative collocation technique is described for modeling implicit viscosity in three-dimensional incompressible wall bounded shear flow. The viscosity can vary temporally and in the vertical direction. Channel flow is modeled with a Fourier-Legendre approximation and the mean streamwise advection is treated implicitly. Explicit terms are handled with an Adams-Bashforth method to increase the allowable time-step for calculation of the implicit terms. The algorithm is applied to low amplitude unstable waves in a plane Poiseuille flow at an Re of 7500. Comparisons are made between results using the Legendre method and with Chebyshev polynomials. Comparable accuracy is obtained for the perturbation kinetic energy predicted using both discretizations.

Zang, T. A.

Spectral methods in time for parabolic problems

A pseudospectral explicit scheme for solving linear, periodic, parabolic problems is described which has infinite accuracy both in time and in space. The high accuracy is achieved while the time resolution parameter M ( = ) (1/delta t) for time marching algorithm) and the space resolution parameter N B = O(1/detla x) have to satisfy M = O(N sup/+epsilon) epsilon O, compared to the common stability condition M = O(N sup 2) which has to be satisfied in any explicit finite order time algorithm.

Tal-Ezer, H.

Elimination of spurious eigenvalues in the Chebyshev tau spectral method

A very simple modification is presented for the Chebyshev tau method which can eliminate spurious eigenvalues, proceeding from a consideration of the vorticity-streamfunction reformulation of the Chebyshev tau method and the Chebyshev-Galerkin method, which have no spurious modes. Consideration of a model problem indicates that these two approaches are equivalent, and that they reduce to the present modification of the tau method. This modified tau method also eliminates spurious eigenvalues from the Orr-Sommerfeld equation.

Mcfadden, G. B.

On the cross-stream spectral method for the Orr-Sommerfeld equation

Cross-stream models are defined as solutions to the Orr-Sommerfeld equation which are propagating normal to the flow direction. These models are utilized as a basis for a Hilbert space to approximate the spectrum of the Orr-Sommerfeld equation with plane Poiseuille flow. The cross-stream basis leads to a standard eigenvalue problem for the frequencies of Poiseuille flow instability waves. The coefficient matrix in the eigenvalue problem is shown to be the sum of a real matrix and a negative-imaginary diagonal matrix which represents the frequencies of the cross-stream modes. The real coefficient matrix is shown to approach a Toeplitz matrix when the row and column indices are large. The Toeplitz matrix is diagonally dominant, and the diagonal elements vary inversely in magnitude with diagonal position. The Poiseuille flow eigenvalues are shown to lie within Gersgorin disks with radii bounded by the product of the average flow speed and the axial wavenumber. It is shown that the eigenvalues approach the Gersgorin disk centers when the mode index is large, so that the method may be used to compute spectra with an essentially unlimited number of elements. When the mode index is large, the real part of the eigenvalue is the product of the axial wavenumber and the average flow speed, and the imaginary part of the eigen value is identical to the corresponding cross-stream mode frequency. The cross-stream method is numerically well-conditioned in comparison to Chebyshev based methods, providing equivalent accuracy for small mode indices and superior accuracy for large indices.

Zorumski, William E.

An Efficient Spectral Method for Ordinary Differential Equations with Rational Function Coefficients

We present some relations that allow the efficient approximate inversion of linear differential operators with rational function coefficients. We employ expansions in terms of a large class of orthogonal polynomial families, including all the classical orthogonal polynomials. These families obey a simple three-term recurrence relation for differentiation, which implies that on an appropriately restricted domain the differentiation operator has a unique banded inverse. The inverse is an integration operator for the family, and it is simply the tridiagonal coefficient matrix for the recurrence. Since in these families convolution operators (i.e. matrix representations of multiplication by a function) are banded for polynomials, we are able to obtain a banded representation for linear differential operators with rational coefficients. This leads to a method of solution of initial or boundary value problems that, besides having an operation count that scales linearly with the order of truncation N, is computationally well conditioned. Among the applications considered is the use of rational maps for the resolution of sharp interior layers.

Coutsias, Evangelos A.

Dynamic Models for LES of Turbulent Front Propagation With a Spectral Method

Direct numerical simulation of turbulent reacting flows places extreme demands on computational resources. At the present time, simulations can be performed only for greatly simplified reaction systems and for very low Reynolds numbers. Direct simulation of more realistic cases occurring at higher Reynolds number and including multiple species and numerous chemical reactions will exceed available computational resources far into the future. Because of this, there is a clear need to develop the technique of large eddy simulation for reacting flows. Unfortunately this task is complicated by the fact that combustion arises from chemical reactions that occur at the smallest scales of the flow. Capturing the large-scale behavior without resolving the small-scale details is extremely difficult in combustion problems. Thus LES modeling for turbulent combustion encounters difficulties not present in modeling momentum transport, in which the main effect of the small scales is to provide dissipation. The difficulty is more pronounced in premixed combustion, where detailed chemistry plays an essential role in determining the flame speed (or overall burning rate); in nonpremixed combustion infinite rate chemistry can be assumed, eliminating the small scale features to a first approximation.

Im, H. G.

Comparison of AGE and Spectral Methods for the Simulation of Far-Wakes

Turbulent flow simulation methods based on finite differences are attractive for their simplicity, flexibility and efficiency, but not always for accuracy or stability. This report demonstrates that a good compromise is possible with the Advected Grid Explicit (AGE) method. AGE has proven to be both efficient and accurate for simulating turbulent free-shear flows, including planar mixing layers and planar jets. Its efficiency results from its localized fully explicit finite difference formulation (Bisset 1998a,b) that is very straightforward to compute, outweighing the need for a fairly small timestep. Also, most of the successful simulations were slightly under-resolved, and therefore they were, in effect, large-eddy simulations (LES) without a sub-grid-scale (SGS) model, rather than direct numerical simulations (DNS). The principle is that the role of the smallest scales of turbulent motion (when the Reynolds number is not too low) is to dissipate turbulent energy, and therefore they do not have to be simulated when the numerical method is inherently dissipative at its resolution limits. Such simulations are termed 'auto-LES' (LES with automatic SGS modeling) in this report.

Bisset, D. K.