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This study aims to feature the application of the artificial compressibility method (ACM) for the numerical prediction of two-dimensional (2D) axisymmetric swirling flows.

The respective academic numerical solver, named IGal2D, is based on the axisymmetric Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations, arranged in a pseudo-Cartesian form, enhanced by the addition of the circumferential momentum equation. Discretization of spatial derivative terms within the governing equations is performed via unstructured 2D grid layouts, with a node-centered finite-volume scheme. For the evaluation of inviscid fluxes, the upwind Roe’s approximate Riemann solver is applied, coupled with a higher-order accurate spatial reconstruction, whereas an element-based approach is used for the calculation of gradients required for the viscous ones. Time integration is succeeded through a second-order accurate four-stage Runge-Kutta method, adopting additionally a local time-stepping technique. Further acceleration, in terms of computational time, is achieved by using an agglomeration multigrid scheme, incorporating the full approximation scheme in a V-cycle process, within an efficient edge-based data structure.

A detailed validation of the proposed numerical methodology is performed by encountering both inviscid and viscous (laminar and turbulent) swirling flows with axial symmetry. IGal2D is compared against the commercial software ANSYS fluent – by using appropriate metrics and characteristic flow quantities – but also against experimental measurements, confirming the proposed methodology’s potential to predict such flows in terms of accuracy.

This study provides a robust methodology for the accurate prediction of swirling flows by combining the axisymmetric RANS equations with ACM. In addition, a detailed description of the convective flux Jacobian is provided, filling a respective gap in research literature.

The purpose of this paper is to present a numerical method for the simulation of steady and unsteady incompressible laminar flows, including convective heat transfer.

A node centered, finite volume discretization technique is applied on hybrid meshes. The developed solver, is based on the artificial compressibility approach.

A sufficient number of representative test cases have been examined for the validation of this numerical solver. A wide range of the various dimensionless parameters were applied for different working fluids, in order to estimate the general applicability of our solver. The obtained results agree well with those published by other researchers. The strongly coupled solution of the governing equations showed superiority compared to the loosely coupled solution as inviscid effects increase.

Convective heat transfer is dominant in a wide variety of practical engineering problems, such as cooling of electronic chips, design of heat exchangers and fire simulation and suspension in tunnels.

A comparison between the strongly coupled solution and the loosely coupled solution of the Navier-Stokes and energy equations is presented. A robust upwind scheme based on Roe’s approximate Riemann solver is proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel unstructured simulation approach for injection molding processes described by the Hele‐Shaw model.

The scheme involves dual dynamic meshes with active and inactive cells determined from an initial background pointset. The quasi‐static pressure solution in each timestep for this evolving unstructured mesh system is approximated using a control volume finite element method formulation coupled to a corresponding modified volume of fluid method. The flow is considered to be isothermal and non‐Newtonian.

Supporting numerical tests and performance studies for polystyrene described by Carreau, Cross, Ellis and Power‐law fluid models are conducted. Results for the present method are shown to be comparable to those from other methods for both Newtonian fluid and polystyrene fluid injected in different mold geometries.

With respect to the methodology, the background pointset infers a mesh that is dynamically reconstructed here, and there are a number of efficiency issues and improvements that would be relevant to industrial applications. For instance, one can use the pointset to construct special bases and invoke a so‐called “meshless” scheme using the basis. This would require some interesting strategies to deal with the dynamic point enrichment of the moving front that could benefit from the present front treatment strategy. There are also issues related to mass conservation and fill‐time errors that might be addressed by introducing suitable projections. The general question of “rate of convergence” of these schemes requires analysis. Numerical results here suggest first‐order accuracy and are consistent with the approximations made, but theoretical results are not available yet for these methods.

This novel unstructured simulation approach involves dual meshes with active and inactive cells determined from an initial background pointset: local active dual patches are constructed “on‐the‐fly” for each “active point” to form a dynamic virtual mesh of active elements that evolves with the moving interface.

An aerodynamic shape optimization algorithm is presented, which includes all aspects of the design process: parameterization, flow computation and optimization. The purpose of this paper is to show that the Class‐Shape‐Refinement‐Transformation method in combination with an Euler/adjoint solver provides an efficient and intuitive way of optimizing aircraft shapes.

The Class‐Shape‐Transformation method was used to parameterize the aircraft shape and the flow was computed using an in‐house Euler code. An adjoint solver implemented into the Euler code was used to compute the required gradients and a trust‐region reflective algorithm was employed to perform the actual optimization.

The results of two aerodynamic shape optimization test cases are presented. Both cases used a blended‐wing‐body reference geometry as their initial input. It was shown that using a two‐step approach, a considerable improvement of the lift‐to‐drag ratio in the order of 20‐30 per cent could be achieved. The work presented in this paper proves that the CSRT method is a very intuitive and effective way of parameterizating aircraft shapes. It was also shown that using an adjoint algorithm provides the computational efficiency necessary to perform true three‐dimensional shape optimization.

The novelty of the algorithm lies in the use of the Class‐Shape‐Refinement‐Transformation method for parameterization and its coupling to the Euler and adjoint codes.

The purpose of this paper is to present the status of the on-going development of the new computerized environment for aircraft synthesis and integrated optimization methods (CEASIOM) and to compare results of different aerodynamic tools. The concurrent design of aircraft is an extremely interdisciplinary activity incorporating simultaneous consideration of complex, tightly coupled systems, functions and requirements. The design task is to achieve an optimal integration of all components into an efficient, robust and reliable aircraft with high performance that can be manufactured with low technical and financial risks, and has an affordable life-cycle cost.

CEASIOM (www.ceasiom.com) is a framework that integrates discipline-specific tools like computer-aided design, mesh generation, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), stability and control analysis and structural analysis, all for the purpose of aircraft conceptual design.

A new CEASIOM version is under development within EU Project AGILE (www.agile-project.eu), by adopting the CPACS XML data-format for representation of all design data pertaining to the aircraft under development.

Results obtained from different methods have been compared and analyzed. Some differences have been observed; however, they are mainly due to the different physical modelizations that are used by each of these methods.

This paper summarizes the current status of the development of the new CEASIOM software, in particular for the following modules: CPACS file visualizer and editor CPACSupdater (Matlab) Automatic unstructured (Euler) & hybrid (RANS) mesh generation by sumo Multi-fidelity CFD solvers: Digital Datcom (Empirical), Tornado (VLM), Edge-Euler & SU2-Euler, Edge-RANS & SU2-RANS Data fusion tool: aerodynamic coefficients fusion from variable fidelity CFD tools above to compile complete aero-table for flight analysis and simulation.

This study aims to assess the robustness and accuracy of the face-centred finite volume (FCFV) method for the simulation of compressible laminar flows in different regimes, using numerical benchmarks.

The work presents a detailed comparison with reference solutions published in the literature –when available– and numerical results computed using a commercial cell-centred finite volume software.

The FCFV scheme provides first-order accurate approximations of the viscous stress tensor and the heat flux, insensitively to cell distortion or stretching. The strategy demonstrates its efficiency in inviscid and viscous flows, for a wide range of Mach numbers, also in the incompressible limit. In purely inviscid flows, non-oscillatory approximations are obtained in the presence of shock waves. In the incompressible limit, accurate solutions are computed without pressure correction algorithms. The method shows its superior performance for viscous high Mach number flows, achieving physically admissible solutions without carbuncle effect and predictions of quantities of interest with errors below 5%.

The FCFV method accurately evaluates, for a wide range of compressible laminar flows, quantities of engineering interest, such as drag, lift and heat transfer coefficients, on unstructured meshes featuring distorted and highly stretched cells, with an aspect ratio up to ten thousand. The method is suitable to simulate industrial flows on complex geometries, relaxing the requirements on mesh quality introduced by existing finite volume solvers and alleviating the need for time-consuming manual procedures for mesh generation to be performed by specialised technicians.

When a multi component alloy solidifies the redistribution of solute components leads to the formation of macrosegregation patterns. Blending ideas from a number of recent publications the purpose of this paper is to provide a “best practice” on how grid convergence of a given macrosegregation simulation can be measured and determined.

The best practice is arrived at by considering a benchmark problem consisting of a 2D-casting simulation of an idealized Al-4.5%Cu alloy in a side cooled square (76×76 mm) cavity. The model for this simulation is based on a mixture treatment of the relevant heat and mass transfer equations. Simulations are made using three increasingly refined grid sizes.

The best practice to determine grid resolution involves two steps: first, a visual evaluation of predicted segregation images leading to the evaluation of solute profiles along selected transects; and second, the construction of a cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the predicted segregation field. On application to the benchmark problem, it is concluded that current computer resources are insufficient to grid resolve macrosegregation patterns but that the CDF provides a useful signal of the nature of macrosegregation in a given system.

The benchmark is chosen to be representative. Exact convergence behavior, however, may depend on the system chosen.

In addition to establishing a best practice for measuring grid resolution of macrosegregation simulations the work also highlights, even in the absence of complete grid convergence, how the recently proposed CDF treatment can inform solidification modeling and process understanding.

This paper aims to develop a meshfree algorithm based on local radial basis functions (RBFs) combined with the differential quadrature (DQ) method to provide numerical approximations of the solutions of time-dependent, nonlinear and spatially one-dimensional reaction-diffusion systems and to capture their evolving patterns. The combination of local RBFs and the DQ method is applied to discretize the system in space; implicit multistep methods are subsequently used to discretize in time.

In a method of lines setting, a meshless method for their discretization in space is proposed. This discretization is based on a DQ approach, and RBFs are used as test functions. A local approach is followed where only selected RBFs feature in the computation of a particular DQ weight.

The proposed method is applied on four reaction-diffusion models: Huxley’s equation, a linear reaction-diffusion system, the Gray–Scott model and the two-dimensional Brusselator model. The method captured the various patterns of the models similar to available in literature. The method shows second order of convergence in space variables and works reliably and efficiently for the problems.

The originality lies in the following facts: A meshless method is proposed for reaction-diffusion models based on local RBFs; the proposed scheme is able to capture patterns of the models for big time T; the scheme has second order of convergence in both time and space variables and Nuemann boundary conditions are easy to implement in this scheme.

The extended Delaunay tessellation (EDT) is presented in this paper as the unique partition of a node set into polyhedral regions defined by nodes lying on the nearby Voronoï spheres. Until recently, all the FEM mesh generators were limited to the generation of tetrahedral or hexahedral elements (or triangular and quadrangular in 2D problems). The reason for this limitation was the lack of any acceptable shape function to be used in other kind of geometrical elements. Nowadays, there are several acceptable shape functions for a very large class of polyhedra. These new shape functions, together with the EDT, gives an optimal combination and a powerful tool to solve a large variety of physical problems by numerical methods. The domain partition into polyhedra presented here does not introduce any new node nor change any node position. This makes this process suitable for Lagrangian problems and meshless methods in which only the connectivity information is used and there is no need for any expensive smoothing process.

This study aims to present a new numerical model for the simulation of water flow through porous media of anisotropic character, based on the network simulation method and with the use of the free code Ngspice.

For its design, it starts directly from the flow conservation equation, which presents several advantages in relation to the numerical simulation of the governing equation in terms of the potential head. The model provides very precise solutions of streamlines and potential patterns in all cases, with relatively small meshes and acceptable calculation times, both essential characteristics when developing a computational tool for engineering purposes. The model has been successfully verified with analytical results for non-penetrating dams in isotropic media.

Applications of the model are presented for the construction of the flow nets, calculation of uplift pressures, infiltrated flow and average exit gradient in anisotropic scenarios with penetrating dams with and without sheet piles, being all this output information part of the decision process in ground engineering problems involving these retaining structures.

This study presents, for the first time, a numerical network model for seepage problems that is not obtained from the Laplace's governing equation, but from the water flow conservation continuity equation.