Robust numerical methods for transonic flows

In this paper, numerical methods for solving the transonic full potential equation are developed. The governing equation is discretized by a flux-biasing finite volume method. The resulting non-linear algebraic system is solved by using a continuation method with full Newton iteration. The continuation method is based on solving a highly 'upstream-weighted' discretization and then gradually reducing the upstream weighting. A general PCG-like sparse matrix iterative solver is used to solve the Jacobians at each non-linear step. Various types of incomplete LU (ILU) preconditioners and ordering techniques are compared. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate that these methods are efficient and robust for solving the transonic potential equation in the workstation computing environment.