Extension of the SU2 open source CFD code to the simulation of turbulent flows of fuids modelled with complex thermophysical laws

Abstract

This paper presents the extension of the open source SU2 software suite to perform turbulent Non-Ideal Compressible Fluid-Dynamics (NICFD) simulations. A new built-in thermodynamic library has been developed and tightly coupled with the existing structure of the code, properly re-organized for accommodating arbitrary thermophysical models. The library implements simple models and interfaces to an external software for a more accurate estimation of thermophysical properties of NICFD pure fluids and mixtures. Moreover, the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations are spatially discretized by resorting to suitably defined convective and viscous numerical schemes for general fluids. The capabilities of the code are finally verified on two-and three-dimensional inviscid and turbulent flow problems against solutions obtained with different NICFD solvers, and known analytical ones. The results prove that SU2 is comparatively accurate and computational efficient with respect to existing codes. Definitively, SU2 can be considered as a trustworthy tool for NICFD-based simulations and the future pillar of advanced automated design techniques involving complex fluid laws.

Fully turbulent discrete adjoint solver for non-ideal compressible flow applications

“…Ad-hoc methods must be used to compute numerical fluxes that are independent from the thermodynamic model of the fluid. For example, the Roe scheme (Roe, 1981) in the generalized formulation presented in (Montagne and Vinokur, 1990) was implemented in SU2 (Vitale et al, 2015).…”

“…The new Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS) adjoint solver was developed by leveraging on the open-source software infrastructure of SU2 (Economon et al, 2015), a platform conceived for solving multi-physics Partial Differential Equation (PDE) and PDE-constrained optimization problems using general unstructured meshes. The SU2 flow solver, previously extended to model NICFD flows (Vitale et al, 2015), was adapted to simulate turbomachinery flows.…”

Non-ideal compressible-fluid effects in oblique shock waves

“…Numerical simulations were run using SU2, an open-source Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) solver, which was recently extended to non-ideal and non-classical flows [24]. SU2 contains an embedded thermodynamic library which counts several different equation of state but can also exploit external library such as FluidProp.…”

An adaptive ALE scheme for non-ideal compressible fluid dynamics over dynamic unstructured meshes

“…Hence, this boundary condition simply nullifies the component of the fluid velocity tangential to the open-boundary (or, if need be, sets it equal to the tangential velocity of the boundary). For the latter case, the boundary state is computed via characteristic reconstruction, and the correct number of the physical variables that can be imposed is automatically computed by the eigenvalues analysis [78,1].…”

“…New methods are continuously developed to better exploit computational resources, to increase solution accuracy, and to extend the range of applicability of CFD to diverse fields. For instance, the numerical simulation of fluid flows within the so-called Non-Ideal Compressible Fluid Dynamics (NICFD) regime still represents some challenges for CFD experts, and it is a very active area of research [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].…”