VISVE – A VIScous Vorticity Equation Model Applied to Cylinders, Hydrofoils, Propellers

Abstract

A newly developed numerical tool for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) computations is presented. This method is designed to be spatially compact and computationally efficient, and meanwhile capable of modeling the dynamics of vortices interacting with solid walls. The vorticity transport equation is solved in the Eulerian frame to model only the vortical regions, where the vorticity is concentrated, in the flow field. Therefore, the computational domain can be made rather small without a loss in accuracy. The small computational domain results in a significantly small number of elements in the grid and considerably less simulation time compared with the velocity based methods, such as the Navier-Stokes methods. The method has a wide range of applications, including the flow past a cylinder, sphere, hydrofoil, and propeller. In addition, both Open-MP and MPI are used to parallel the code to further facilitate its performance. Validations against the experimental results and numerical results from other methods have been conducted to verify the correctness, robustness, and computational efficiency of the current method.