An Efficient, Unstructured Flow Solver for Complex Aircraft Configurations in Maneuvering Flight

AeroSoft proposes the development of efficient and accurate Computational Fluid Dynamics methods for calculating the airflow characteristics over complex bodies with time-dependent, Reynolds-Averaged, Navier-Stokes equations which have been augmented to allow for dynamic meshes as well as non-equilibrium chemistry and thermodynamics. The dynamic-mesh approach proposed here is based on a dual time-stepping algorithm with parallel, implicit, time-integration schemes, and time-dependent metrics which satisfy the Geometric Conservation Law. The development of such a software package would impact the design of modern aircraft and would be applicable to simulations such as store release from military aircraft, aircraft with moving control surfaces, retracting landing gear, space shuttle-booster separation, and variable geometry inlets, combustors, and nozzles. Also of considerable interest is improving the efficiency of steady-state simulations. AeroSoft proposes implementing a multigrid convergence acceleration with agglomeration, which has been shown to improve efficiency for the simulation of viscous/turbulent flows on unstructured meshes. Combined with the existing parallel, implicit, time-integration schemes, this will provide a valuable tool for obtaining steady-state solutions to propulsion related flows.