Development of an Unstructured Parallel Flow Solver for Arbitrary Mach Numbers

Kidambi Sreenivas, Daniel Hyams, Stephen Nichols, Brent Mitchell, Lafe Taylor, Roger Briley and David Whitfield
UT SimCenter at Chattanooga, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee, 37403

A flow solver capable of solving the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations on general unstructured grids with non-simplical elements has been developed. The flow solver employs a preconditioning algorithm that makes it applicable to low speed (essentially incompressible; Mach number = 0.001) as well as high speed (Mach number > 1) flows. The present parallel unstructured flow solver is based on coarse-grained domain decomposition for concurrent solution within subdomains assigned to multiple processors. The code employs MPI message passing for interprocessor communication. Representative results are presented for low speed as well as high speed flows. The results include comparisons between the solutions obtained using the arbitrary Mach number algorithm and an incompressible solver (for low speed cases) and a compressible solver (for high speed cases) as well as experimental data.