High performance simulations of compressible flows inside car engine geometries using the N3S-NATUR parallel solver

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the application of the N3S-NATUR parallel CFD software to industrial flow problems taken from the automotive industry. N3S-NATUR is a finite element software that solves the 3D compressible Navier–Stokes equations coupled to a two-equation turbulence model, around or inside complex geometries. N3S-NATUR is capable of handling calculations on deforming meshes and is therefore particularly well suited to the simulation of unsteady flows inside piston engine geometries. The parallelization of N3S-NATUR relies on a strategy that combines domain partitioning techniques and a message passing programming model. Results are presented and discussed for steady and unsteady flow calculations performed on an SGI Origin 2000 MIMD system, a Pentium Pro cluster and a DEC Alpha cluster; for both clusters, the interconnection is realized through a FastEthernet (100 Mbit/s) switch.