Rapid Development of Advanced High-Speed Aerosciences Simulation Capability

The current state of the art for production computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations in both the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) communities and modeling of hypersonic vehicles is the solution of steady-state problems on fixed computation grids. However, the majority of relevant challenge problems are unsteady. Accurate simulations of such unsteady phenomena currently require computational grids that are overly refined, i.e., in large portions of the domain or even globally. An effective method to alleviate over-refinement, and associated cost, is the application of automatic mesh adaptation. Mesh adaptation applies refinement in the vicinity of critical flow features while coarsens at other areas and can significantly reduce the time-to-solution in terms of both overall computation time and hands-on gridding. However, a production-level unsteady mesh adaptation capability for aerothermodynamic analysis involving high-speed viscous flows (with boundary layers and strong unsteady shocks) is yet to be developed.In the proposed effort, Corvid Technologies, LLC (Corvid) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) will develop an unsteady/time-accurate adaptive simulation capability for hypersonic flows with evolving geometries. Corvid and RPI will leverage couple high-fidelity components for CFD simulation of hypersonic vehicles, error indication/estimation and feature detection for mesh adaptation triggers, and geometry and mesh modification to provide the adaptive workflow.