Computation of fluid flow with multi-grid and multi-block algorithms

Abstract

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has wide applications in areas such as aerospace, automobile and materials manufacturing industries. The development of CFD procedures has progressed extremely rapidly during the past two decades. However, the real world processes are usually too large and too complicated to simulate due to the computing and memory limits. The problems that are facing the computational fluid dynamicist can be briefly summarized as discretization and variable storing strategies, convergence acceleration of solution procedure, handling of complex geometries and turbulence modeling.

In the present study, an effort is made to develop solution procedures to tackle the above mentioned problems. The evaluation of the pressure field has always been the difficult issue in the primitive variable approach. To eliminate a wavy pressure field, the staggered grid approach was developed by Harlow and Welch (1965), but implementation of the staggered grid for a three-dimensional, curvilinear coordinate system is complicated and tiresome. In the present study, the results and convergence histories with using a solution procedure based on non-staggered grid system are reported and compared with that of staggered grid system. After comparing the flow field and convergence histories, the present non-staggered grid formulation proved as a potential alternative to staggered grid formulation. There has never been any pressure oscillation in this practice.