Robust and efficient computation of turbulent flows around civil transport aircraft at flight Reynolds numbers

Abstract

This work aims at providing numerical methods that enable the robust and efficient simulation of turbulent flows around civil transport aircraft configurations at flight Reynolds numbers. Robustness problems related to the multigrid treatment of advanced transport equation turbulence models have been identified preventing convergence of simulations at high or flight Reynolds numbers. Therefore the application of multigrid to the turbulence equations is omitted while the multigrid treatment of the mean flow equations stays unchanged. Moreover, a fully implicit time integration scheme – a DDADI approach – is applied to the turbulence equations. The new approach raised robustness to a sufficient level to converge viscous computations at flight Reynolds numbers. Furthermore, the convergence speed of aerodynamic coefficients for three dimensional applications has also been improved significantly.