Immersed boundary method for high-order flux reconstruction based on volume penalization

High-order methods are quickly becoming popular for turbulent flows as the amount of computer processing power increases. The flux reconstruction (FR) method presents a unifying framework for a wide class of high-order methods including discontinuous Galerkin (DG), Spectral Difference (SD), and Spectral Volume (SV). It offers a simple, efficient, and easy way to implement nodal-based methods that are derived via the differential form of the governing equations. Whereas high-order methods have enjoyed recent success, they have been known to introduce numerical instabilities due to polynomial aliasing when applied to under-resolved nonlinear problems. Aliasing errors have been extensively studied in reference to DG methods; however, their study regarding FR methods has mostly been limited to the selection of the nodal points used within each cell. Here, we extend some of the de-aliasing techniques used for DG methods, primarily over-integration, to the FR framework. Our results show that over-integration does remove aliasing errors but may not remove all instabilities caused by insufficient resolution (for FR as well as DG).

A combined volume penalization / selective frequency damping approach for immersed boundary methods applied to high-order schemes

A very high-order flux reconstruction approach coupled to the MPFA-QL finite volume method for the numerical simulation of oil-water flows in 2D petroleum reservoirs

A coupled high-order implicit-explicit flux reconstruction lattice Boltzmann method for nearly incompressible thermal flows

Recently, the flux reconstruction (FR) method has attracted more and more attentions for its simplicity and generality. However, it is still computationally expensive and time consuming when simulating the complex flow problems by FR method. There is a huge demand for developing appropriate efficient implicit solvers and parallel computing techniques for FR. This paper proposes an implicit high-order flux reconstruction solver on GPU platform based on the block Jacobi iteration method. As it is inefficient to solve the large global linear system resulting from spatial and implicit temporal discretization of FR directly. A block Jacobi approach is used to change the characteristics of the lift-hand matrix of the global linear system and this avoids the dependence of neighboring elements. Therefore, only the diagonal blocks of global matrix need to be stored and calculated. Then, the problem of solving the huge global linear system is transformed into solving a series of local linear equations simultaneously. Finally, these small local linear equations would be solved by the LU decomposition method in parallel on GPU platforms. Two typical cases, including subsonic flows over a bump and a NACA0012 airfoil, were simulated and compared with the multi-grid explicit Runge-Kutta scheme. The numerical results demonstrated that the present implicit method can reduce the iterations significantly. Meanwhile, the implicit solver has shown at least 10x speedup over the multi-grid Runge-Kutta scheme in all cases.

The article presents a novel computational algorithm for modeling of heat and mass transfer processes around neighboring solid objects and inside granular layers. It is based on a volume penalization approach formulated in the framework of an immersed boundary technique, which allows using Cartesian computational meshes for modeling of solid objects with virtually arbitrarily complex shapes and in any form of contact (point-to-point, point-to-surface, etc.). The spatial discretization is performed using a high-order compact discretization/interpolation method on the meshes in which the locations of velocity, density, and temperature are partially staggered with respect to the locations of pressure nodes. Compared to the conventional collocated node arrangement, the present approach has a stabilizing effect, which is very desirable in case of a sudden change of geometry inside the computational grids, especially when high-order discretization is applied. The formulated algorithm is verified based on the following test cases: (i) three hot solid spherical objects immersed in a stream of cold flow; (ii) two granular beds with hundreds of hot solid objects placed in a flowing cold fluid. The results are compared to the solutions obtained using ANSYS-Fluent software and experimental data. In all the cases, the agreement of the results is very good.

A high-order accurate flow solution method for quadrilateral elements is developed and tested. The method employs the flux reconstruction (FR) approach proposed by Huynh. Ideal orders of accuracy are achieved for several problems on structured-based grids while some deterioration is observed on purely unstructured grids. Cares for curved wall boundary are also shown. The localized artificial diffusivity (LAD) method is incorporated to capture discontinuities that is crucial for compressible flow simulations. The FR+LAD works very well for 1D test cases but multi-dimensional shock problems requires further modifications to confine the artificial diffusivity to the shock location. Hybrid scheme of the FR and finite difference method taking advantage of 1D-feature alleviates the instability. I. Introduction Expanding demands for the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) requires more reliable numerical schemes. Specifically, turbulent flow simulations, acoustic simulation, combustion simulations and their combined problems. The key words in such simulations may be high accuracy and high resolution. In structured grid CFD, a compact finite difference scheme satisfies both requirements at higher level than existing other methods. If we put more emphasis on easier handling of complex geometries and flow-data dependent grid generation (grid adaptation), then unstructured grid method should also be explored and it should depart from 2nd-order scheme with limiter. Recent efforts in this area are development of the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method, 1,2 the spectral finite volume (SV) method 3 and the staggered-grid multi-domain method spectral finite difference (SG) method 4,5 and its evolutional method called a spectral difference method. 6 The common and maybe the only way for those unstructured methods is to add degrees of freedom in each cell to achieve high order since the wide stencil of the original grid is not possible due to unstructured nature. The ENO-type method that uses original degrees of freedom in the grids and extends adaptive stencils to the flow solutions is also explored but the difficulty of extending stencils due to undirectional nature of unstructured grids and the unsuitability for parallel computing prohibits wide applications. A flux reconstruction (FR) scheme 7,8 studied in the paper is the new one among the former group. It uses differential form of conservation laws like the SD method but it is more general and includes equivalent counter part of the schemes in the group. In this paper, the performance of the FR is tested by a newly developed Navier-Stokes solver. Realistic flow applications of the FR in the Navier-Stokes equations are seldom seen since it is relatively new scheme. The Localized artificial diffusivity (LAD) 9–13 is incorporated for the shock capturing in the FR. The last item is motivated by the challenge and success of combining the SD and LAD in the recent study. 11,12 Wang 14 developed the lifting collocation penalty (LCP) method to extend the FR to triangular or tetrahedral grids and applied the LCP-FR combined method for hybrid unstructured grids. In the present study, only quadrilateral cells are treated to directly apply the LAD method that was developed on structured grids. The shock capturing by the FR+LAD high order scheme is tried.

The flux reconstruction approach to high-order methods is robust, efficient, simple to implement, and allows various high-order schemes, such as the nodal discontinuous Galerkin method and the spectral difference method, to be cast within a single unifying framework. Utilizing a flux reconstruction formulation, it has been proved (for one-dimensional linear advection) that the spectral difference method is stable for all orders of accuracy in a norm of Sobolev type, provided that the interior flux collocation points are located at zeros of the corresponding Legendre polynomials. In this article the aforementioned result is extended in order to develop a new class of one-dimensional energy stable flux reconstruction schemes. The energy stable schemes are parameterized by a single scalar quantity, which if chosen judiciously leads to the recovery of various well known high-order methods (including a particular nodal discontinuous Galerkin method and a particular spectral difference method). The analysis offers significant insight into why certain flux reconstruction schemes are stable, whereas others are not. Also, from a practical standpoint, the analysis provides a simple prescription for implementing an infinite range of energy stable high-order methods via the intuitive flux reconstruction approach.

We propose a high-order immersed boundary (IB) method for simulating inviscid flows using the flux reconstruction (FR) method, which offers the advantages of a compact stencil, high-order near-wall accuracy, and the ability to handle thin geometries and sharp corners. We utilize the FR method on a Cartesian grid to achieve a compact stencil, which enhances accuracy without requiring surrounding cell information, laying the foundation for future adaptive mesh refinement. Compared to the symmetry wall condition treatment, we combine the curvature corrected symmetry technique with the FR-based IB method to achieve a high-order accuracy near the wall boundary and utilize a third-order polynomial distribution to impose the boundary conditions. We extend the multi-valued ghost-cell method to the present approach to handle thin geometries and sharp corners in the ghost-cell-based IB method. The proposed method can be easily extended to three-dimensional cases. The numerical framework is validated through several two-dimensional simulations of inviscid flows. The approach is first demonstrated for a superposition of an isentropic vortex and a background flow problem with a Mach number of 0.2, which examines the order of accuracy without wall effects in the grid convergence study. Then, inviscid flow around a cylinder and flow through a channel with a bump are tested and compared to body-fitted simulations. Finally, flows around a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics 0012 airfoil with zero and non-zero angles of attack are demonstrated to show the robustness for the thin geometry calculation. In particular, third-order accuracy is maintained in the near-wall region.

This dissertation, framed within an Industrial Doctorate programme, has the twofold objective of improving the understanding of numerical properties and convergence acceleration techniques for High-Order methods, and to formulate an efficient incompressible flow solver for thermal applications. The first part of this manuscript is devoted to the study of the linear multi-grid method applied to Flux Reconstruction, a relatively recent High-Order numerical method with close relations to the well-known Discontinuous Galerkin and Spectral Difference schemes. We do so by investigating the non-modal dissipation behaviour of the multi-grid scheme as a function of its parameters, in an effort to find the most efficient configurations. The analysis is extended to 2D high aspect-ratio cells, in the presence of dominating convection. The second part of this manuscript introduces a High-Order incompressible flow solver devised by the simultaneous use of the Flux Reconstruction, the Discontinuous Galerkin and the Continuous Galerkin methods, each of which is known to offer increased computational efficiency for certain types of problems. On the one end of the spectrum, the Flux Reconstruction is an efficient algorithm for the explicit evaluation of fluxes in conservative form; on the other end, the Continuous Galerkin method is comparatively very efficient for the resolution of diffusion-dominated steady problems. The different formulations are put together in a fractional-step approach and validated against known test cases – unsteady Stokes and Taylor problems, lid-driven cavity, Taylor-Green vortex and thermally-driven cavity – with and without analytical solution, demonstrating convergence with mesh, time-step and polynomial refinement. RESUMEN El presente trabajo, enmarcado en un programa de Doctorado Industrial, tiene el doble objetivo de mejorar la comprensión de las propiedades numéricas y técnicas de aceleración de convergencia para métodos de alto orden, así como de formular un solver eficiente para la resolución de flujos incompresibles con aplicaciones térmicas. La primera parte del manuscrito está dedicada al estudio del método multi-grid lineal aplicado a Flux Reconstruction, un método numérico de alto orden relativamente reciente y estrechamente relacionado con los conocidos Discontinuous Galerkin y Spectral Difference. Ello se consigue investigando la disipación numérica no-modal del esquema multi-grid en función de sus parámetros, con el objetivo de determinar aquellas configuraciones más eficientes. El análisis se extiende a 2D con elementos con alta relación de aspecto en presencia de convección dominante. La segunda parte del manuscrito presenta un solver de alto orden incompresible concebido con el uso simultáneo de los métodos Flux Reconstruction, Discontinuous Galerkin y Continuous Galerkin, cada uno de los cuales ofrece una eficiencia computacional superior para ciertos tipos de problemas. En un extremo, Flux Reconstruction es un algoritmo eficiente para la evaluación explícita de flujos en forma conservativa; en el otro extremo, Continuous Galerkin es comparativamente muy eficiente para la resolución de problemas elípticos en estado estacionario. Las diferentes formulaciones se conjugan en un método de paso fraccionado validado con conocidos casos test con y sin solución analítica, demostrando convergencia con el refinamiento en el mallado, el orden polinomial y el paso de tiempo.

In this paper, the ability of high-order flux reconstruction numerical schemes to perform accurate and stable computations of compressible turbulent flows on coarse meshes is investigated. Two new flux reconstruction schemes, which are optimized for wave dissipation and dispersion properties, are compared to the nodal discontinuous Galerkin and spectral difference methods recovered via the energy-stable flux reconstruction method. The Taylor–Green vortex benchmark problem at is used as a simple a priori test of the numerics. Dissipation rates computed from kinetic energy, vorticity, and pressure dilatation are plotted against reference solutions. Results show that, at low mesh resolution, the flux reconstruction schemes are highly accurate across a range of orders of accuracy, although oscillations can appear in the solution at orders of six and above. Although the flux reconstruction method has a built-in stabilization mechanism, an additional means of damping these instabilities is required. The schemes vary in the amount of numerical dissipation and resolution of the turbulent spectrum. One of the optimized flux reconstruction schemes (the optimized flux reconstruction scheme) is shown to have greater spectral accuracy than any of the others tested, motivating its future usage for high-order high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics.

The least square-based finite difference-finite volume (LSFD-FV) method has been developed and successfully applied to solve various two-dimensional flow problems with a high-order of accuracy. In this paper, the extension of the LSFD-FV method to the three-dimensional (3D) case on unstructured grids is presented. Different from other existing high-order methods, the LSFD-FV method combines the good features of the least square-based finite difference (LSFD) scheme for derivative approximation and the finite volume (FV) discretization for conservation of physical laws. Within each control cell, a high-order polynomial resultant from a Taylor series expansion is used to approximate the solution in the FV discretization of governing equations, where the derivatives are approximated by the LSFD scheme. As a result, the mesh-free nature of the LSFD scheme endows the LSFD-FV method with the flexibility on unstructured grids. Additionally, the straightforward algorithm of the LSFD scheme and the direct utilization of the Taylor series polynomial make the LSFD-FV method user-friendly and easy to implement. Furthermore, the inviscid and viscous fluxes are simultaneously evaluated by lattice Boltzmann and gas kinetic flux solvers in this work, which avoids additional and complicated treatment for the viscous discretization. Accuracy studies on unstructured hexahedral and tetrahedral grids validate the third-order of accuracy of the 3D LSFD-FV method. Various 3D incompressible and compressible numerical experiments are also presented. The results show that the proposed method enjoys the higher accuracy than the conventional second-order method on the same mesh. When the same accuracy is achieved, the present high-order method has superior computational efficiency to the second-order counterpart.

The aim of this work is to model compressible flows involving shock waves past a solid obstacle using a non-conformal mesh. An Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) with feedback forcing and a volume penalization method are considered and compared. Both methods are validated on various test-cases. Accuracy and computational cost are discussed.

This paper proposes and analyzes arbitrarily high-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) and finite volume methods which provably preserve the positivity of density and pressure for the ideal MHD on general meshes. Unified auxiliary theories are built for rigorously analyzing the positivity-preserving (PP) property of MHD schemes with a HLL type flux on polytopal meshes in any space dimension. The main challenges overcome here include establishing relation between the PP property and discrete divergence of magnetic field on general meshes, and estimating proper wave speeds in the HLL flux to ensure the PP property. In 1D case, we prove that the standard DG and finite volume methods with the proposed HLL flux are PP, under condition accessible by a PP limiter. For multidimensional conservative MHD system, standard DG methods with a PP limiter are not PP in general, due to the effect of unavoidable divergence-error. We construct provably PP high-order DG and finite volume schemes by proper discretization of symmetrizable MHD system, with two divergence-controlling techniques: locally divergence-free elements and a penalty term. The former leads to zero divergence within each cell, while the latter controls the divergence error across cell interfaces. Our analysis reveals that a coupling of them is important for positivity preservation, as they exactly contribute the discrete divergence-terms absent in standard DG schemes but crucial for ensuring the PP property. Numerical tests confirm the PP property and the effectiveness of proposed PP schemes. Unlike conservative MHD system, the exact smooth solutions of symmetrizable MHD system are proved to retain the positivity even if the divergence-free condition is not satisfied. Our analysis and findings further the understanding, at both discrete and continuous levels, of the relation between the PP property and the divergence-free constraint.

: Unsteady motions of airfoils at low Reynolds numbers were studied computationally using low-order vortex lattice methods and using two high-order methods: a Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes code and an Immersed Boundary method. Results from the low-order methods compared well with experimental and computational results in the literature for small reduced amplitudes and frequencies. The high-order methods were compared with experiments on high intensity pitch and plunging motions at Reynolds numbers of 10,000 and 40,000. The pitch (rotation about the quarter chord) and plunge motions were at reduced frequencies of 3.93 and with kinematically equivalent amplitudes of effective angle of attack at the quarter-chord location. For the plunge cases, agreement between computation and experiment was qualitatively excellent and quantitatively acceptable, but for the pitch cases, the wake structure in the experiment was markedly different from that predicted by both computations, which were however similar among one another. In all cases, Reynolds number effects were found to be negligible. On-going research aims to determine the parameters necessary for pitch-plunge equivalence and also resolve the poor experiment-computation agreement for pitch.