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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.

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Sketch-To-Solution: An Exploration of Viscous CFD with Automatic Grids

Numerical simulation of the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations has become a critical tool for the design of aerospace vehicles. However, the issues that affect the grid convergence of three dimensional RANS solutions are not completely understood, as documented in the AIAA Drag Prediction Workshop series. Grid adaption methods have the potential for increasing the automation and discretization error control of RANS solutions to impact the aerospace design and certification process. The realization of the CFD Vision 2030 Study includes 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 by using analysis without demonstration in flight test (i.e., certification or qualification by analysis). For example, the Cart3D inviscid analysis package has automated Cartesian cut-cell gridding with output-based error control. Fueled by recent advances in the fields of anisotropic grid adaptation, error estimation, and geometry modeling, a similar work flow is explored for viscous CFD simulations; where a CFD application engineer provides geometry, boundary conditions, and flow parameters, and the sketch-to-solution process yields a CFD simulation through automatic, error-based, grid adaptation.

Kleb, William L.↗

High Resolution Aerospace Applications using the NASA Columbia Supercomputer

This paper focuses on the parallel performance of two high-performance aerodynamic simulation packages on the newly installed NASA Columbia supercomputer. These packages include both a high-fidelity, unstructured, Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver, and a fully-automated inviscid flow package for cut-cell Cartesian grids. The complementary combination of these two simulation codes enables high-fidelity characterization of aerospace vehicle design performance over the entire flight envelope through extensive parametric analysis and detailed simulation of critical regions of the flight envelope. Both packages. are industrial-level codes designed for complex geometry and incorpor.ats. CuStomized multigrid solution algorithms. The performance of these codes on Columbia is examined using both MPI and OpenMP and using both the NUMAlink and InfiniBand interconnect fabrics. Numerical results demonstrate good scalability on up to 2016 CPUs using the NUMAIink4 interconnect, with measured computational rates in the vicinity of 3 TFLOP/s, while InfiniBand showed some performance degradation at high CPU counts, particularly with multigrid. Nonetheless, the results are encouraging enough to indicate that larger test cases using combined MPI/OpenMP communication should scale well on even more processors.

Mavriplis, Dimitri J.↗

Summary and Statistical Analysis of the First AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop

A summary is provided for the First AIAA Sonic Boom Workshop held 11 January 2014 in conjunction with AIAA SciTech 2014. Near-field pressure signatures extracted from computational fluid dynamics solutions are gathered from nineteen participants representing three countries for the two required cases, an axisymmetric body and simple delta wing body. Structured multiblock, unstructured mixed-element, unstructured tetrahedral, overset, and Cartesian cut-cell methods are used by the participants. Participants provided signatures computed on participant generated and solution adapted grids. Signatures are also provided for a series of uniformly refined workshop provided grids. These submissions are propagated to the ground and loudness measures are computed. This allows the grid convergence of a loudness measure and a validation metric (dfference norm between computed and wind tunnel measured near-field signatures) to be studied for the first time. Statistical analysis is also presented for these measures. An optional configuration includes fuselage, wing, tail, flow-through nacelles, and blade sting. This full configuration exhibits more variation in eleven submissions than the sixty submissions provided for each required case. Recommendations are provided for potential improvements to the analysis methods and a possible subsequent workshop.

Park, Michael A.↗

A Cartesian grid approach with hierarchical refinement for compressible flows

Many numerical studies of flows that involve complex geometries are limited by the difficulties in generating suitable grids. We present a Cartesian boundary scheme for two-dimensional, compressible flows that is unfettered by the need to generate a computational grid and so it may be used, routinely, even for the most awkward of geometries. In essence, an arbitrary-shaped body is allowed to blank out some region of a background Cartesian mesh and the resultant cut-cells are singled out for special treatment. This is done within a finite-volume framework and so, in principle, any explicit flux-based integration scheme can take advantage of this method for enforcing solid boundary conditions. For best effect, the present Cartesian boundary scheme has been combined with a sophisticated, local mesh refinement scheme, and a number of examples are shown in order to demonstrate the efficacy of the combined algorithm for simulations of shock interaction phenomena.

Quirk, James J.↗

Progress Towards a Cartesian Cut-Cell Method for Viscous Compressible Flow

The proposed paper reports advances in developing a method for high Reynolds number compressible viscous flow simulations using a Cartesian cut-cell method with embedded boundaries. This preliminary work focuses on accuracy of the discretization near solid wall boundaries. A model problem is used to investigate the accuracy of various difference stencils for second derivatives and to guide development of the discretization of the viscous terms in the Navier-Stokes equations. Near walls, quadratic reconstruction in the wall-normal direction is used to mitigate mesh irregularity and yields smooth skin friction distributions along the body. Multigrid performance is demonstrated using second-order coarse grid operators combined with second-order restriction and prolongation operators. Preliminary verification and validation for the method is demonstrated using flat-plate and airfoil examples at compressible Mach numbers. Simulations of flow on laminar and turbulent flat plates show skin friction and velocity profiles compared with those from boundary-layer theory. Airfoil simulations are performed at laminar and turbulent Reynolds numbers with results compared to both other simulations and experimental data

Berger, Marsha↗

The adaptive, cut-cell Cartesian approach (warts and all)

Solution-adaptive methods based on cutting bodies out of Cartesian grids are gaining popularity now that the ways of circumventing the accuracy problems associated with small cut cells have been developed. Researchers are applying Cartesian-based schemes to a broad class of problems now, and, although there is still development work to be done, it is becoming clearer which problems are best suited to the approach (and which are not). The purpose of this paper is to give a candid assessment, based on applying Cartesian schemes to a variety of problems, of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach as it is currently implemented.

Powell, Kenneth G.↗