Development of a Pressure-Based CFD Solver for All-Speed Flows on Arbitrary Polygonal Meshes in a Rule-Based Framework

Over the last decade significant new technologies have been developed which allow the scientist/engineer to design reliable programs for simulating the complex physics involved in turbulent flow combustion devices. In the area of numerical algorithm development, a significant step forward has come with the maturation of unstructured grid methods, which provide a host of benefits over traditional methods employing structured multi-block grids with a curvilinear coordinate framework. Some of these benefits, which have been extensively discussed in the literature, include the ease of mesh generation, mesh refinement and mesh movement for problems with moving domain boundaries. One of the most practical benefits, though, is the ease with which numerical algorithms can be developed for the automatic mapping of unstructured grids to parallel, distributed-memory computer architectures, which are evolving as the architectures of choice for computer codes which are being employed to solve problems of ever-increasing complexity, involving multi-disciplinary physics and ever-increasing grid size. There are, however, some disadvantages associated with unstructured grid methods, primarily in the form of increased data file size and program memory compared to structured grid counterparts, as well as the extra challenge required to obtain optimum performance of unstructured codes on cache-based memory architectures. However, with advances in computer hardware, these do not appear to be stumbling blocks.