Abstract

High-order (HO) methods are of concerted academic and industrial interest in recent years due to their improved accuracy and their capability to deal with complex geometries [1]. Of particular note is the flux reconstruction method [2], which unifies several existing HO schemes into a simpler and computationally efficient approach that has been shown to work on all element types (including simplices) in two and three dimensions. There is considerable interest to apply HO methods to industrially relevant problems. At the same time, accurate and robust turbulence modeling techniques are essential for reliable results. As outlined in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's CFD vision 2030 study, Large Eddy Simulation (LES) still remains impractical for industrial cases therefore, Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) and hybrid RANS-LES methods hold high significance in the near future [4]. Achieving fastest convergence to steady-state is important in the context of RANS simulations, for which several convergence acceleration techniques are being investigated. Multigrid methods are an industry standard in Finite Volume (FV) type schemes and are increasingly being applied to HO methods in the form of p-multigrid [22]. They exploit the polynomial hierarchy of the solution space to represent errors on a coarser resolution. A natural extension of this idea is hp-multigrid, where we can augument the classical h-multigrid to the polynomial hierarchy [23]. In this paper we illustrate the application of high-order flux reconstruction methods to simulate compressible, turbulent flows on body-fitted meshes. The case in point is the turbulent flow over a flat plate [24]. Turbulence is modeled through the RANS approach using the one-equation Spalart-Allmaras model. Grid-coarsening for the h-levels is performed by removing every other line in each direction from the original mesh. The system is driven to a steady-state solution using hp-multigrid convergence acceleration with local time-stepping using an explicit Runge-Kutta time-marcher. We show that the augumented h-multigrid is highly effective with a 10X to 24X drop in convergence time.

Abstract

In the last decade, high-order methods for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are becoming attractive for unsteady scale-resolving-simulations in industrial CFD applications, due to their advantages of low numerical dissipation, high efficiency on modern architectures and quasi mesh-independence. However, the generation of body-fitted mesh for high-order methods is still a significant bottleneck and often determines the overall quality of the solution. To avoid the complexity of mesh generation, the present work combines the numerical advantages of the high-order Flux Reconstruction (FR) method and the simplicity of the mesh generation based on Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) that allows solving flow past obstacles on a non body-fitted mesh. The volume penalization method is selected for its ease of implementation and robustness. The proposed method is validated by several test cases, including flow past a cylinder and NACA0012 airfoil for static and moving boundaries. Good agreement with body-fitted simulation is reported.

Abstract

The present study introduces an application of the non-modal analysis to multigrid operators with explicit Runge-Kutta smoothers in the context of Flux Reconstruction discretizations of the linear convection-diffusion equation. A dissipation curve is obtained that reflects upon the convergence properties of the multigrid operator. The number of smoothing steps, the type of cycle (V/W) and the combination of pand h-multigrid are taken into account in order to find those configurations which yield faster convergence rates. The analysis is carried out for polynomial orders up to P = 6, in 1D and 2D for varying degrees of convection (Péclet number), as well as for high aspect ratio cells. The non-modal analysis can support existing evidence on the behaviour of multigrid schemes. W-cycles, a higher number of coarse-level sweeps or the combined use of hp-multigrid are shown to increase the error dissipation, while higher degrees of convection and/or high aspect-ratio cells both decrease the error dissipation rate.