HIGH-PERFORMANCE SOLUTION OF 3-DIMENSIONAL NONLINEAR AEROELASTIC PROBLEMS VIA PARALLEL PARTITIONED ALGORITHMS - METHODOLOGY AND PRELIMINARY-RESULTS

In this paper, we highlight some key elements of our approach to the s olution of large-scale three-dimensional nonlinear aeroelastic problem s on high performance computational platforms. These include a three-f ield arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) finite volume/element formula tion for the coupled fluid/structure problem, the derivation of a geom etric conservation law for three-dimensional flow problems with moving boundaries and unstructured deformable meshes, and the solution of th e corresponding coupled semi-discrete equations with a partitioned pro cedure. In particular, we present a family of mixed explicit/implicit staggered solution algorithms, and discuss them with particular refere nce to accuracy, stability, subcycling, and parallel processing. We de scribe a general framework for the solution of coupled aeroelastic pro blems on heterogeneous and/or parallel computational platforms, and il lustrate it with some preliminary numerical investigations on an iPSC- 860, a Paragon XP/S, and a Gray T3D massively parallel systems of the aerodynamics and aeroelastic transient response of a three-dimensional wing in transonic airstreams. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Limited. All rights reserved.