A Parallel Processing Approach to Transition Prediction for Laminar Flow Control System Design

The performance of transport aircraft can be considerably improved if the process by which the wing boundarylayer becomes turbulent can be controlled and extensive areas of laminar flow maintained. In order to design laminar flow control systems, it is necessary to be able to predict the movement of the transition location in response to changes in control variables e.g: surface suction. At present, the technique which is available to industry requires excessively long computational time so long that it is not suitable for use in the ‘design process’. Therefore, there is a clear need to produce a system which delivers results in near realtime i.e: in seconds rather than hours. This paper details how parallel computing techniques on a KSR1 produce these performance improvements.