A sharp interface immersed boundary method for compressible viscous flows

Abstract

An immersed boundary method for computing viscous, subsonic compressible flows with complex shaped stationary immersed boundaries is presented. The method employs a ghost-cell technique for imposing the boundary conditions on the immersed boundaries. The current approach leads to a sharp representation of the immersed boundaries, a property that is especially useful for flow simulations at high Reynolds numbers. Another unique feature of the method is that it can be applied on Cartesian as well as generalized body non-conformal curvilinear meshes. A mixed second-order central difference-QUICK scheme is used which allows a high degree of control over the numerical damping. A bilinear interpolation scheme used in conjunction with the ghost-cell approach results in second-order global as well as local spatial accuracy. The solver is parallelized for distributed memory platforms using domain decomposition and message passing interface (MPI) and salient features of the parallel algorithm are presented. The accuracy, fidelity and efficiency of the solver are examined by simulating flow past circular cylinders and airfoils and comparing against experimental data and other established results. Finally, we present results from a simulation of wing-tip flow at a relatively high Reynolds number in order to demonstrate the ability of the solver to model complex, non-canonical three-dimensional flows.