AIAA 2002-3124 The DG/VMS Method for Unified Turbulence Simulation

The high cost of wind tunnel testing and the ongoing reduction in national wind tunnel facilities are forcing the aerospace engineering community to increasingly rely on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to predict the performance of new aircraft designs. However, most aerospace applications are characterized by flows that exhibit large-scale unsteady turbulence and the accurate prediction of these flows is often critical to predicting overall performance. Unfortunately, the turbulence modeling approaches used in existing industrial CFD simulation tools often do not accurately predict large-scale turbulent flows which limits their utility. This paper introduces a new paradigm, called the DG/VMS method, for CFD that is specifically designed to accurately and efficiently predict complex flows dominated by large-scale turbulence. Here, the DG/VMS formulation is presented along with results for several laminar validation tests. Our future work will apply the DG/VMS to turbulent flows.