NUMERICALLY ROBUST 3-D FINITE-ELEMENT REYNOLDS AVERAGED NAVIER-STOKESSOLVER FOR THE STUDY OF TURBULENT SUPERSONIC EXTERNAL FLOWS

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.