An arbitrarily high-order, unstructured, free-wake panel solver

Abstract

A high-order panel code capable of solving the potential flow equation about arbitrary curved geometries is presented. A new method for integrating curved, high-order panels using adaptive Gaussian quadrature is detailed. Furthermore, automated wake handling is addressed and a method to robustly solve for the steady-state free-wake rollup is proposed. Finally, a Fast Multipole Method with a complexity that scales as O(N) is also presented so that large problems can be handled using only a linear mesh. Results are presented to demonstrate high order accuracy and agreement with other inviscid solvers for a variety of test cases.