Ghost-cell method for analysis of inviscid three-dimensional flows on Cartesian-grids

The present paper deals with the implementation of non-penetration boundary conditions at solid walls for three-dimensional inviscid flow computations on Cartesian grids. The crux of the method is the curvature-corrected symmetry technique (CCST) developed by the present authors for body-fitted grids. The method introduces ghost cells near the boundaries whose values are developed from an assumed flow-field model in vicinity of the wall consisting of a vortex flow, with locally symmetric distribution of entropy and total enthalpy. In three dimensions this procedure is implemented in the so-called "osculating plane". This method was shown to be substantially more accurate than traditional surface boundary condition approaches. This improved boundary condition is adapted to a Cartesian mesh formulation, which we have termed the "ghost-cell method". In this approach, all cell centers exterior to the body are computed with fluxes at the six surrounding cell faces, without any cut cell. A multiple-valued point technique is used to compute sharp edges. The merits of the ghost-cell method for three-dimensional inviscid flow computations are established by computing compressible and transonic flows about a sphere, an oblate and a prolate spheroid, a cylindrical wing with an end-plate, the ONERA M6 wing and detailed comparison to body-fitted grid computations and to published data. The computed results show the surface non-penetration condition to be satisfied in the limit of vanishing cell size and the method to be second-order accurate in space. The comparison with body-fitted results proves that the accuracy is comparable to the accuracy of CCST computations on body-fitted grids and remarkably superior to body-fitted computations based on traditional pressure extrapolation, non-penetration boundary conditions. In addition, we prove that the results are independent of the position of the body with respect to the grid. Finally, we show that the ONERA M6 wing results compare very well with published data. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.