Multigrid acceleration of an upwind Euler method for hovering rotor flows

The effect of multigrid acceleration implemented within an upwind-biased Eu ler method for hovering rotor flows is presented. The requirement to captur e the vortical wake development over several turns means a long numerical i ntegration time is required for hovering rotors, and the solution (wake) aw ay from the blade is significant. Furthermore, the flow in the region near the blade root is effectively incompressible. Hence, the solution evolution and convergence is different to a fixed wing case where convergence depend s primarily on propagating errors away from the surface as quickly as possi ble, and multigrid acceleration is shown to be less effective for hovering rotor flows. It is found that a simple V-cycle is the most effective, smoot hing in the decreasing mesh density direction only, with a relaxed trilinea r prolongation operator. Results are presented for multigrid computations w ith 2, 3, 4, and 5 mesh levels, and a CPU reduction of approximately 80% is demonstrated for five mesh levels.