A PARALLEL MOVING GRID MULTIGRID METHOD FOR FLOW SIMULATION IN ROTOR-STATOR CONFIGURATIONS

A parallel multigrid finite volume solver for the prediction of unstea dy flows in rotor-stator configurations using a moving-grid technique is presented. The numerical solution procedure is based on a second-or der finite volume discretization with collocated block-structured grid s, an implicit time discretization, a pressure-correction procedure of SIMPLE type, a non-linear multigrid method and a grid partitioning te chnique for parallelization. For the handling of the rotation and the relative movement of stationary and moving parts of the configuration a splitting technique is employed, which: based on the block structuri ng, divides the computational domain in a stationary and a rotating pa rt. According to this splitting, the time-dependent flow equations are solved in a stationary and rotating frame of reference, and a special coupling procedure is used for the interfacial blocks. The method is investigated with respect to its accuracy, where special emphasis is g iven to the influence of different interpolation techniques of pressur e-related terms within the non-staggered pressure-correction scheme. A s a practical application, the flow in a stirrer configuration with ba ffles is studied, for which also results concerning the numerical and parallel efficiency of the proposed method are given. (C) 1998 John Wi ley & Sons, Ltd.