Fast computation of stationary inviscid flow around an airfoil

Abstract

The parallel performance of an implicit solver for the Euler equations on a structured grid is discussed. The flow studied is a two-dimensional transonic flow around an airfoil. The spatial discretization involves the MUSCL scheme, a higher-order Total Variation Diminishing scheme. The solver described in this paper is an implicit solver that is based on quasi Newton iteration and approximate factorization to solve the linear system of equations resulting from the Euler Backward scheme. It is shown that the implicit time-stepping method can be used as a smoother to obtain an efficient and stable multigrid process. Also, the solver has good properties for parallelization comparable with explicit time-stepping schemes. To preserve data locality domain decomposition is applied to obtain a parallelizable code. Although the domain decomposition slightly affects the efficiency of the approximate factorization method with respect to the number of time steps required to attain the stationary solution, the results show that this hardly affects the performance for practical purposes. The accuracy with which the linear system of equations is solved is found to be an important parameter. Because the method is equally applicable for the Navier-Stokes equations and in three-dimensions, the presented combination of efficient parallel execution and implicit time-integration provides an interesting perspective for time-dependent problems in computational fluid dynamics.