AN UNSTRUCTURED GRID METHOD FOR A PRESSURE-BASED FLOW AND HEAT-TRANSFER SOLVER

An unstructured grid method is developed along with an implicit pressu re-based solver to calculate flow and heat transfer problems. The meth od ir finite volume based and utilizes collocated and cell-centered st orage scheme. New second-order discretizations of the convection and d iffusion terms are derived and presented for triangular or tetrahedral cells. The pressure damping for promoting stability and the PISO algo rithm for resolving the velocity-pressure coupling are extended to the unstructured grid solver A number of two-dimensional flow cases have been calculated to validate the unstructured grid method. The validati on cases encompass laminar and turbulent flows with and without heat t ransfer. At the end, an application to a flow through a branched duct with cooling fins is presented to demonstrate the flexibility of the u nstructured grid method for flows with complex geometry.