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At least 127 records · Page 7

Discretization and Preconditioning Algorithms for the Euler and Navier-Stokes Equations on Unstructured Meshes

Several stabilized discretization procedures for conservation law equations on triangulated domains will be considered. Specifically, numerical schemes based on upwind finite volume, fluctuation splitting, Galerkin least-squares, and space discontinuous Galerkin discretization will be considered in detail. A standard energy analysis for several of these methods will be given via entropy symmetrization. Next, we will present some relatively new theoretical results concerning congruence relationships for left or right symmetrized equations. These results suggest new variants of existing FV, DG, GLS and FS methods which are computationally more efficient while retaining the pleasant theoretical properties achieved by entropy symmetrization. In addition, the task of Jacobian linearization of these schemes for use in Newton's method is greatly simplified owing to exploitation of exact symmetries which exist in the system. These variants have been implemented in the "ELF" library for which example calculations will be shown. The FV, FS and DG schemes also permit discrete maximum principle analysis and enforcement which greatly adds to the robustness of the methods. Some prevalent limiting strategies will be reviewed. Next, we consider embedding these nonlinear space discretizations into exact and inexact Newton solvers which are preconditioned using a nonoverlapping (Schur complement) domain decomposition technique. Elements of nonoverlapping domain decomposition for elliptic problems will be reviewed followed by the present extension to hyperbolic and elliptic-hyperbolic problems. Other issues of practical relevance such the meshing of geometries, code implementation, turbulence modeling, global convergence, etc. will be addressed as needed.

Barth, Timothy↗

Higher Order Time Integration Schemes for the Unsteady Navier-Stokes Equations on Unstructured Meshes

The efficiency gains obtained using higher-order implicit Runge-Kutta schemes as compared with the second-order accurate backward difference schemes for the unsteady Navier-Stokes equations are investigated. Three different algorithms for solving the nonlinear system of equations arising at each timestep are presented. The first algorithm (NMG) is a pseudo-time-stepping scheme which employs a non-linear full approximation storage (FAS) agglomeration multigrid method to accelerate convergence. The other two algorithms are based on Inexact Newton's methods. The linear system arising at each Newton step is solved using iterative/Krylov techniques and left preconditioning is used to accelerate convergence of the linear solvers. One of the methods (LMG) uses Richardson's iterative scheme for solving the linear system at each Newton step while the other (PGMRES) uses the Generalized Minimal Residual method. Results demonstrating the relative superiority of these Newton's methods based schemes are presented. Efficiency gains as high as 10 are obtained by combining the higher-order time integration schemes with the more efficient nonlinear solvers.

Jothiprasad, Giridhar↗

Time-Accurate, Unstructured-Mesh Navier-Stokes Computations with the Space-Time CESE Method

Application of the newly emerged space-time conservation element solution element (CESE) method to compressible Navier-Stokes equations is studied. In contrast to Euler equations solvers, several issues such as boundary conditions, numerical dissipation, and grid stiffness warrant systematic investigations and validations. Non-reflecting boundary conditions applied at the truncated boundary are also investigated from the stand point of acoustic wave propagation. Validations of the numerical solutions are performed by comparing with exact solutions for steady-state as well as time-accurate viscous flow problems. The test cases cover a broad speed regime for problems ranging from acoustic wave propagation to 3D hypersonic configurations. Model problems pertinent to hypersonic configurations demonstrate the effectiveness of the CESE method in treating flows with shocks, unsteady waves, and separations. Good agreement with exact solutions suggests that the space-time CESE method provides a viable alternative for time-accurate Navier-Stokes calculations of a broad range of problems.

Chang, Chau-Lyan↗

Exploring Unstructured Mesh Adaptation for Hybrid Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes/Large Eddy Simulation

Mesh adaptation methods for the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations are rapidly maturing and beginning to impact the design of aerospace vehicles. RANS turbulence modeling improvements have slowed and may stagnate. Wall-modeled large eddy simulation (LES) and hybrid RANS/LES (HRLES) may provide an improved modeling capability but require specialized expertise to construct appropriate meshes and are considered be too ex-pensive for routine practical use. The realization of the CFD Vision 2030 Study includes improving geometry linkage, mesh generation/adaptation, and turbulence modeling/resolving methods for automated management of errors and uncertainties of physics-based, predictive modeling that can set the stage for ensuring a vehicle is in compliance with a regulation or specification (i.e., certification or qualification by analysis). An exploration of mesh adaptation for HRLES is performed to document synergies and challenges between mesh adaptation and HRLES. Vortex breakdown over a delta wing is examined to show the improvement of HRLES over RANS turbulence modeling approaches. A high lift configuration is shown to demonstrate complex geometry capability. Research and development opportunities are identified to advocate for continuing investments that may allow HRLES to enter routine practical use as a tool for aerospace vehicle analysis and design.

Michael A Park↗

Verification of Viscous Goal-Based Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation

Adaptive unstructured mesh techniques have a limited, but growing impact on production analysis workflows where the control of discretization error is critical to obtaining reliable simulation results. Recent progress has matured a number of independent implementations of flow solvers, anisotropic metric construction methods, and anisotropic mesh adaptation mechanics. A key ingredient for the broader acceptance of unstructured mesh adaptation is the verification of these implementations. Anisotropic metric construction methods are evaluated with analytically defined primal fields and the corresponding entropy variables as adjoint fields. This allows the comparison of different metric formulations and different implementations of the same formulation without the complications of a flow and adjoint solution method. The convergence of the output associated with the entropy variable adjoint is studied for mesh adaptation to these fields and a manufactured solution. Mesh adapted drag output is studied for two simple wings in compressible laminar flow to show fine-mesh convergence of multiple metric construction methods to less than a single drag count. The documentation of these verification exercises helps to prepare these goal-based methods for routine use in more complex simulations for production workflows.

mesh adaptation↗

Verification of Viscous Goal-Based Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation

Adaptive unstructured mesh techniques have a limited, but growing impact on production analysis workflows where the control of discretization error is critical to obtaining reliable simulation results. Recent progress has matured a number of independent implementations of flow solvers, error estimation methods, and anisotropic mesh adaptation mechanics. Anisotropic metric construction methods are evaluated with analytically defined primal and adjoint fields. This allows the comparison of different metric formulations and different implementations of the same formulation without the complications of a flow and adjoint solution method. Unstructured mesh adaptation tools are verified by comparison on analytic primal and dual field before verification on benchmark aerodynamics cases. The documentation of these verification exercises helps to prepare these goal-based methods for routine use in production simulation workflows.

Mesh adaptation↗

Evaluation of Flow Routing on the Unstructured Voronoi Meshes in Earth System Modeling

Flow routing is a fundamental process of Earth System Models' (ESMs) river component. Traditional flow routing models rely on Cartesian rectangular meshes, which exhibit limitations, particularly when coupled with unstructured mesh-based ocean components. They also lack the support for regionally refined models. While previous studies have highlighted the potential benefits of unstructured meshes for flow routing, their widespread application and comprehensive evaluation within ESMs remain limited. This study extends the river component of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model to unstructured Voronoi meshes. We evaluated the model's performance in simulating river discharge and water depth across three watersheds spanning the Arctic, temperate, and tropical regions. The results show that while providing several benefits, unstructured mesh-based flow routing can achieve comparable performance to structured mesh-based routing, and their difference is often less than 10%. Although the unstructured mesh-based method could address several existing limitations, this research also shows that additional improvements in the numerical method are needed to fully exploit the advantages of unstructured mesh for hydrologic and ESMs.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Research in unsteady aerodynamics and computational aeroelasticity at the NASA Langley Research Center

This paper presents recent results in the unsteady aerodynamics and computational aeroelasticity research programs at the NASA Langley Research Center. These programs include development of two types of computational methods: methods that use structured computational meshes and those that use unstructured meshes. Results show that an aeroelastic analysis method that uses unsteady transonic small disturbance (TSD) potential aerodynamics and structured, Cartesian meshes is capable of accurate analysis of complex aircraft configurations. The paper describes recent enhancements to the TSD method that allow analysis of vehicles with swept, flexible vertical surfaces and flexible fuselages and presents selected results that verify the accuracy of the new capabilities. Modifications to a structured-mesh Euler/Navier-Stokes method to allow aeroelastic analysis are described, and a wing flutter analysis using the resulting method is presented. Advantages of using unstructured meshes for the analysis of complex configurations are discussed. The paper presents development of unstructured-mesh Euler/Navier-Stokes methods for unsteady aerodynamics and aeroelastic analysis. Spatial and temporal adaption methods on unstructured meshes are described, and selected results are presented.

Whitlow, Woodrow, Jr.↗

Temporal-adaptive Euler/Navier-Stokes algorithm for unsteady aerodynamic analysis of airfoils using unstructured dynamic meshes

A temporal adaptive algorithm for the time-integration of the two-dimensional Euler or Navier-Stokes equations is presented. The flow solver involves an upwind flux-split spatial discretization for the convective terms and central differencing for the shear-stress and heat flux terms on an unstructured mesh of triangles. The temporal adaptive algorithm is a time-accurate integration procedure which allows flows with high spatial and temporal gradients to be computed efficiently by advancing each grid cell near its maximum allowable time step. Results indicate that an appreciable computational savings can be achieved for both inviscid and viscous unsteady airfoil problems using unstructured meshes without degrading spatial or temporal accuracy.

Kleb, William L.↗

Temporal-adaptive Euler/Navier-Stokes algorithm for unsteady aerodynamic analysis of airfoils using unstructured dynamic meshes

A temporal adaptive algorithm for the time-integration of the two-dimensional Euler or Navier-Stokes equations is presented. The flow solver involves an upwind flux-split spatial discretization for the convective terms and central differencing for the shear-stress and heat flux terms on an unstructured mesh of triangles. The temporal adaptive algorithm is a time-accurate integration procedure which allows flows with high spatial and temporal gradients to be computed efficiently by advancing each grid cell near its maximum allowable time step. Results indicate that an appreciable computational savings can be achieved for both inviscid and viscous unsteady airfoil problems using unstructured meshes without degrading spatial or temporal accuracy.

Kleb, William L.↗

Rapid Hypersonic Simulations using US3D and Pointwise

For hypersonic simulations, unstructured flow solvers typically have problems predicting surface heat fluxes when strong shocks are present. To address these issues, this paper outlines a workflow that applies best practices developed for structured grids to unstructured meshes. In addition, unstructured grid generation can significantly reduce the time required to create quality grids for complex geometries. Several examples are computed using DPLR, a structured grid flow solver, and US3D flow, an unstructured mesh solver. Results from the two codes are compared, and they show excellent agreement. Overall, the unstructured grid workflow offers a viable and attractive alternative for hypersonic simulations.

C. Tang↗

Rapid Hypersonic Simulations using US3D and Pointwise

For hypersonic simulations, unstructured flow solvers typically have problems predicting surface heat fluxes when strong shocks are present. To address these issues, this paper outlines a workflow that applies best practices developed for structured grids to unstructured meshes. In addition, unstructured grid generation can significantly reduce the time required to create quality grids for complex geometries. Several examples are computed using DPLR, a structured grid flow solver, and US3D flow, an unstructured mesh solver. Results from the two codes are compared, and they show excellent agreement. Overall, the unstructured grid workflow offers a viable and attractive alternative for hypersonic simulations.

Chun Tang↗

PLUM: Parallel Load Balancing for Unstructured Adaptive Meshes

Dynamic mesh adaption on unstructured grids is a powerful tool for computing large-scale problems that require grid modifications to efficiently resolve solution features. By locally refining and coarsening the mesh to capture physical phenomena of interest, such procedures make standard computational methods more cost effective. Unfortunately, an efficient parallel implementation of these adaptive methods is rather difficult to achieve, primarily due to the load imbalance created by the dynamically-changing nonuniform grid. This requires significant communication at runtime, leading to idle processors and adversely affecting the total execution time. Nonetheless, it is generally thought that unstructured adaptive- grid techniques will constitute a significant fraction of future high-performance supercomputing. Various dynamic load balancing methods have been reported to date; however, most of them either lack a global view of loads across processors or do not apply their techniques to realistic large-scale applications.

Oliker, Leonid↗

PLUM: Parallel Load Balancing for Unstructured Adaptive Meshes

Dynamic mesh adaption on unstructured grids is a powerful tool for computing large-scale problems that require grid modifications to efficiently resolve solution features. Unfortunately, an efficient parallel implementation is difficult to achieve, primarily due to the load imbalance created by the dynamically-changing nonuniform grid. To address this problem, we have developed PLUM, an automatic portable framework for performing adaptive large-scale numerical computations in a message-passing environment. First, we present an efficient parallel implementation of a tetrahedral mesh adaption scheme. Extremely promising parallel performance is achieved for various refinement and coarsening strategies on a realistic-sized domain. Next we describe PLUM, a novel method for dynamically balancing the processor workloads in adaptive grid computations. This research includes interfacing the parallel mesh adaption procedure based on actual flow solutions to a data remapping module, and incorporating an efficient parallel mesh repartitioner. A significant runtime improvement is achieved by observing that data movement for a refinement step should be performed after the edge-marking phase but before the actual subdivision. We also present optimal and heuristic remapping cost metrics that can accurately predict the total overhead for data redistribution. Several experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness of PLUM on sequences of dynamically adapted unstructured grids. Portability is demonstrated by presenting results on the two vastly different architectures of the SP2 and the Origin2OOO. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of five state-of-the-art partitioning algorithms that can be used within PLUM. It is shown that for certain classes of unsteady adaption, globally repartitioning the computational mesh produces higher quality results than diffusive repartitioning schemes. We also demonstrate that a coarse starting mesh produces high quality load balancing, at a fraction of the cost required a fine initial mesh. Results indicate that our parallel load balancing strategy will remain viable on large numbers of processors.

Oliker, Leonid↗

VULCAN-CFD User Manual: Ver. 7.2.0

VULCAN-CFD offers a comprehensive set of capabilities to enable the simulation of continuum flowfields from subsonic to hypersonic conditions. The governing equations that are employed include allowances for both chemical and thermal nonequilibrium processes, coupled with a wide variety of turbulence models for both Reynolds-averaged and large eddy simulations. The software package can simulate two-dimensional, axisymmetric, or three-dimensional problems on structured multiblock meshes or fully unstructured meshes. A parabolic (i.e., space-marching) treatment can also be used for any subset of a structured mesh that can accommodate this solution strategy. The flow solver provides a significant level of geometric flexibility for structured grid simulations by allowing for arbitrary face-to-face C(0) continuous and non-C(0) continuous block interface connectivities. The unstructured grid paradigm allows for mixed element unstructured meshes that contain any combination of tetrahedral, prismatic, pyramidal, and hexahedral cell elements. The flow solver is also fully parallelized using MPI (Message Passing Interface) libraries in a data-parallel fashion, allowing for efficient simulations on modern High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. This document provides information related to the installation and execution of the VULCAN-CFD software package. A detailed description of the physical and numerical models available in the software are provided in the VULCAN-CFD Theory Manual.

VULCAN-CFD User Manual↗