A. Matesanz et al., NUMERICALLY ROBUST 3-D FINITE-ELEMENT REYNOLDS AVERAGED NAVIER-STOKESSOLVER FOR THE STUDY OF TURBULENT SUPERSONIC EXTERNAL FLOWS, Computer methods in applied mechanics and engineering, 159(3-4), 1998, pp. 383-394
A 3-D finite element Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes solver for supers
onic flows is presented and described. The solver has been developed t
o target industrial aerodynamics applications in the field of reusable
launcher design and, therefore, specific emphasis has been put on max
imizing numerical robustness. To achieve this goal, the turbulence mod
el can be chosen beforehand between two options: a k-epsilon formulati
on or a combined algebraic/k-epsilon scheme that gets the best charact
eristics out of both formulations. In addition, to ensure quick conver
gence in the early stages of the time-marching procedure, a theoretica
l analysis is performed to gather and implement into the algorithm the
limiting behavior of k and epsilon wherever turbulent production is d
ominant. Results of the validation campaign are presented, a practical
application case is shown, and finally, conclusions are drawn. (C) 19
98 Elsevier Science S.A.