Robust adaptive high-order RANS methods

Abstract

The ability to achieve accurate predictions of turbulent flow over arbitrarily complex geometries proves critical in the advancement of aerospace design. However, quantitatively accurate results from modern Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools are often accompanied by intractably high computational expenses and are significantly hindered by the lack of automation. In particular, the generation of a suitable mesh for a given flow problem often requires significant amounts of human input. This process however encounters difficulties for turbulent flows which exhibit a wide range of length scales that must be spatially resolved for an accurate solution. Higher-order adaptive methods are attractive candidates for addressing these deficiencies by promising accurate solutions at a reduced cost in a highly automated fashion. However, these methods in general are still not robust enough for industrial applications and significant advances must be made before the true realization of robust automated three-dimensional turbulent CFD. This thesis presents steps towards this realization of a robust high-order adaptive Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) method for the analysis of turbulent flows. Specifically, a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretization of the RANS equations and an output-based error estimation with an associated mesh adaptation algorithm is demonstrated. To improve the robustness associated with the RANS discretization, modifications to the negative continuation of the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model are reviewed and numerically demonstrated on a test case. An existing metric-based adaptation framework is adopted and modified to improve the procedure's global convergence behavior. The resulting discretization and modified adaptation procedure is then applied to two-dimensional and three-dimensional turbulent flows to demonstrate the overall capability of the method.