RotCFD: A Viscous Design Tool for Advanced Configurations

The incorporation of viscous analysis in design is vital for a complete understanding of aerodynamic problems. This proposal offers to develop and integrate with RotCFD a method for semi-automatically generating grids suitable for viscous analysis on complex configurations as well as parallelize the solver in RotCFD to take advantage of today's multi-core machines. The principle idea behind the semi-automation of the grid generation is to divide the geometry surface into patches and generate body-conforming grids from these patches. This partitioning allows for automatic generation of grids with aspect ratios suitable for viscous flows. Convection dominates the outer region, so unstructured Cartesian meshes can be generated quickly and easily here. The outer grid will be conformed to the inner grid so the entire grid can be treated as one unstructured grid with an unstructured solver, or as a hybrid grid with multiple zones and solvers. In the hybrid approach, viscous solvers can be used for the inner zone while the faster inviscid solvers can be used in the far-field. In Phase I a proof-of-concept grid generator, and a conceptual methodology for solver parallelization will be developed and demonstrated to work with RotCFD the rotor aerodynamic design tool. In Phase II, the features of the grid generator and solver will be fully developed and expanded. More »