Navier-Stokes for the design of transport aircrafts using parallel computing

In order to account for the complexity of the geometry when studying airframe engine configuration, current AEROSPATIALE responsibility within the Airbus system, a general purpose 3D Navier-Stokes multi-block code NSMB has been developed in cooperation with european partners. The intensive use of this method has the potential to reduce significantly the cost of the design once overcome the efficiency of the convergence, the mesh generation, and turbulence models for complex geometries. In order to bring the computational cost of a Navier-Stokes computation over a complete aircraft down to an acceptable level for design engineers. the parallelization of NSMB was undertaken within the framework of Parallel Aero project. Parallelization performances of NSMB are presented on different platforms for a flow over an airfoil and a wing, and a complete aircraft AS28G. AEROSPATIALE have used NSMB on CRAY-J916 with AS28G test case with a wide range of processor numbers. For these complex configuration and flow, the Navier-Stokes solution using a specifically parallelized algebraic turbulence model is remarkably close to the experiment.