Multidomain solution algorithm for potential flow computations around complex configurations

Abstract

A method is presented for the computation of irrotational transonic flows of perfect gas around a wide class of geometries. It is based on the construction of a multidomain structured grid and then on the solution of the full potential equation discretized with finite elements. The novelty of the paper is the combination of three embedded algorithms: a mixed fixed-point/Newton algorithm to treat the non-linearity, a multidomain conjugate gradient algorithm to handle the grid topology and another conjugate gradient algorithm in each of the structured domains. This method has made possible the calculations of flows around geometries that cannot be treated in a structured approach without the multidomain algorithm; an application of this method to the study of the wing-pylon-nacelle interactions is presented.