RANS Simulation using the Spectral Volume Scheme on Unstructured Tetrahedral Grids

A high-order aerodynamics simulation code for the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations is developed using the spectral volume (SV) method for unstructured tetrahedral meshes. A nonlinear LU-SGS implicit scheme is used to enhance convergence to the steady state solution, and a novel reconstruction limiter for the SV method is developed to improve the accuracy and the convergence property for flows with shock waves. The turbulent viscosity is modeled by the Spalart-Allmaras (SA) one-equation model. The developed code is validated for turbulent flow over a flat plate and assessed for a transonic flowfield over a wing studied in the third AIAA drag prediction workshop (DPW-3). Computations of a turbulent flow over high-lift devices are performed, and the ability to predict complicated flowfields is demonstrated favorably via comparison with the reference data. The developed code is fully parallelized for application to large-scale industrial problems by using domain decomposition and MPI. © 2014 The Japan Society for Aeronautical and Space Sciences.