A three-dimensional fast solver for arbitrary vorton distributions

Abstract

A method which is capable of an efficient calculation of the three-dimensional flow field produced by a large system of vortons (discretized regions of vorticity) is presented in this report. The system of vortons can, in turn, be used to model body surfaces, container boundaries, free-surfaces, plumes, jets, and wakes in unsteady three-dimensional flow fields. This method takes advantage of multipole and local series expansions which enables one to make calculations for interactions between groups of vortons which are in well-separated spatial domains rather than having to consider interactions between every pair of vortons. In this work, series expansions for the vector potential of the vorton system are obtained. From such expansions, the three components of velocity can be obtained explicitly. A Fortran computer code FAST3D has been written to calculate the vector potential and the velocity components at selected points in the flow field. In this code, the evaluation points do not have to coincide with the location of the vortons themselves. Test cases have been run to benchmark the truncation errors and CPU time savings associated with the method. Non-dimensional truncation errors for the magnitudes of the vector potential and velocity fields are on the order of 10{sup {minus}4}and 10{sup {minus}3} respectively. Single precision accuracy produces errors in these quantities of up to 10{sup {minus}5}. For less than 1,000 to 2,000 vortons in the field, there is virtually no CPU time savings with the fast solver. For 100,000 vortons in the flow, the fast solver obtains solutions in 1 % to 10% of the time required for the direct solution technique depending upon the configuration.