Capizzano AIAA 2007 1450 821

45th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit AIAA 2007-1450
8 - 11 January 2007, Reno, Nevada
A Compressible Flow Simulation System Based on

Cartesian Grids with Anisotropic Refinements
Francesco Capizzano∗
CIRA Italian Aerospace Research Center, Capua (CE), 81043, Italy
Downloaded by ITALIAN CENTER FOR on March 14, 2014 | http://arc.aiaa.org | DOI: 10.2514/6.2007-1450
The paper describes the principal aspects of an in-house developed simulation system,
based on Cartesian grids and an immersed boundary technique, able to simulate compres-
sible 2D/3D inviscid steady flows. Particular features of the system are the flexibility in
treating arbitrary geometries and the automation of the gridding process. The final goal
is to simplify and hopefully speed up the pre-design process of aerodynamic-type configu-
rations.
Two key points drive the design of the tool: the reconstruction of the near-wall fluxes
and the local grid refinement strategy. The former is addressed by a face-based boundary
condition model to force conservation at the near-wall cells. The latter makes use of a
fully unstructured data management with two major advantages. Firstly there are no
restrictions on the number of grid refinement levels compared with structured or semi-
structured methods. Secondly the cell splitting can be performed in an anisotropic way.
The Euler equations are solved by a cell-centered finite volume method based on a
second-order central difference for the convective terms with added artificial dissipation
to damp the oscillatory nature of the scheme. The integration procedure is obtained by
using Runge-Kutta pseudo-time relaxation. Local time stepping is performed in each cell
to accelerate convergence together with enthalpy damping. The Cartesian grid method,
coupled with a face-based flux reconstruction, allows a high level of vectorization of the
flow solver to be obtained on a vector machine.
Two typical test-cases are presented: the two-dimensional flow around a circular cylinder
and the three-dimensional flow past a sphere. Numerical results for the NACA0012 airfoil
in subsonic and transonic flow conditions are discussed. The Onera M 6 wing is considered
as an example of a 3D application.
I. Introduction
he tuning of a combined project loop based on computer aided design (CAD), numerical analysis and
T experimental tests involve a lot of designers in the different fields of fluid dynamics. Methods based on
body-conforming grids require a complex grid generation which is time consuming even for skilled people.
Furthermore this process is not truly automatic and difficulties arise in problems requiring re-meshing.
Cartesian grid techniques are getting much attention from the fluid dynamic research community thanks to
the simplicity and flexibility in treating arbitrary 3D geometries coupled with a high level of automation
during the meshing phase. Cartesian meshes can also be refined near the model surface by using local grid
refinement techniques (LGR): e.g. based on recursively applied cell-splitting procedures. Low expertise is
necessary to run an automatic grid generator. The user has only to set a small number of input parameters
such as domain extensions and the target cell dimensions. However, a price must be paid for this ease of
gridding. Indeed other difficulties arise. Firstly, a proper near-wall approach which is able to take into
∗ Research Engineer, Ph.D., Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, AIAA member.
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American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Copyright © 2007 by Dr. Francesco Capizzano . Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., with permission.
account of the presence of the body inside the flow field. Secondly, the development of a complex grid
generator which has to detect the embedded geometry and automatically cluster cells near the wall. These
issues are addressed in different ways. The most largely diffused approaches are the cut-cell and the immersed
boundary (IB) techniques.
In the cut-cell method the boundary is represented by cut-cells obtained by intersection of the Cartesian
cell and the boundary surface.1, 2 The near-wall cells are polyhedral composed of Cartesian normal-directed
faces and boundary cut-faces. Once the cut-faces have been reconstructed the fluxes are exact in the sense of
classic body-conforming approaches. Different algorithms have been proposed for the cut-cell reconstruction.
The one proposed in Ref. 3 performs arbitrary 3D intersections between a body surface triangulation and
hexahedral cells. A look-up table containing a restricted ensemble of possible three-dimensional intersections
between the body and the hexahedral cells (marching cubes technique) is introduced in Ref. 4. However
these and other geometrical procedures are not-trivial and give rise to complex polyhedral cells.
In the IB method the boundary is immersed in the grid and its effects on the external flow are taken into
account by a proper body force field.5 The near-wall Cartesian cells are identified by a ray-tracing technique6
and their geometry is left unchanged. The tagging procedure provides the necessary geometric information
to allow the proper near-wall IB model to be used. This information usually consists of intersections points,
distances and surface unit normal vectors.7, 8 The forcing function can be added to the continuous governing
equations and then the complete set solved by a discretized numerical method.5, 9 Alternatively the governing
equations can be discretized and the scheme modified in the near-wall region.10, 11 In this case a direct
boundary condition (BC) model is used along with interpolation schemes of varying accuracy.12, 13 An
exhaustive description of these methodologies is reported in Ref. 14.
A finite-volume based method is presented which is able to simulate 2D/3D compressible inviscid flows on
Cartesian grids. A discrete forcing IB approach is used along with proper face-based linear interpolations to
satisfy the boundary conditions on the immersed surfaces. Fully unstructured data management is adopted
to allow a robust and automatic grid refinement procedure. The latter is an essential element for a tool whose
goals are realistic 3D simulations. Indeed a Cartesian IB or cut-cell method itself, implemented on uniform
or stretched meshes, is limited in its application due to the creation of wasted cells. Only the use of a grid
refinement strategy can help Cartesian methods to be competitive with respect to their body-conforming
counterparts in terms of memory and CPU savings.
Two and three dimensional test-cases have been carried out to validate the approach. Comparisons with
body-conforming simulations are presented on both the NACA0012 airfoil and the Onera M 6 swept wing.
II. The Simulation System

The simulation system is based on Cartesian grids i.e. using hexahedra
having normals oriented in the Cartesian axes directions. It is made up
of
1. a pre-processing module
2. a flow simulation module
3. a post-processing module
as summarized in the flow diagram of fig. 1. The pre-processing phase is
characterized by:
Figure 1. The simulation pro-
• the reading and identification of the CAD geometry cess.
• the setting of the integration domain boundaries

• the generation of a Cartesian grid coupled with an LGR technique
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This phase is automatic provided there are a small number of input parameters. The flow simulation module
consists of a fully unstructured Cartesian solver based on an immersed boundary method. The selection
and downloading of the solution data characterize the post-processing. The system simulates compressible
inviscid 3D flows with future extension to Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) methods in mind.
III. Data Management and Local Grid Refinement

The refinement of the grid near the immersed surfaces is a necessary item for three dimensional viscous
applications together with relative low memory requirements. In general, grid adaptation is obtained by
splitting the original Cartesian cell into the three orthogonal directions. A 3D cell refinement is isotropic
when all the coordinate directions are involved at the same time. The anisotropic refinement involve one ore
two coordinate directions at a time. Three different strategies have been used in the literature:14
• structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR),7, 8

• OCTREE,2, 3
• fully unstructured.15–17
In the AMR case an underlying structured fine grid is used to retrieve information for the LGR grid with
good memory and CPU savings with respect to the OCTREE and fully unstructured approaches. However
it is unclear how many grid refinement levels can be achieved without losing competitiveness.
In the OCTREE approach the Cartesian cells are stored by using a typical data-tree structure in which the
connectivity information associated with each cell neighbour can be obtained by following the tree parent-
child structure. This method is simple and efficient when the cells are split isotropically and is suitable
for Object Oriented programming. Moreover the tree structure management deteriorates when anisotropic
refinement is enforced.
A fully unstructured data arrangement requires the explicit use of arrays of neighbours (arrays of pointers)
with an increase in the memory storage with respect to the first two methods.
In the case of Cartesian grids a limited number of integers are able to
completely define the cell geometry avoiding the necessity for storing real
numbers.16, 17 Memory saving is fundamental for 3D numerical simula-
tions. Anisotropic refinement can alleviate the problem of memory re-
quirements by
• a reduction in the number of the LGR cells with respect to isotropic
refinement
• a certain modification of the cell aspect ratio near geometry or near
regions of preferential flow gradient directions
The method proposed in this paper uses a fully unstructured data man-
agement to store Cartesian meshes with anisotropic refinements. The
basic entities are cells and faces which are treated as objects. Each cell Figure 2. Cell tagging.
stores the pointers to its faces and two sets of grid indices16
• 3D standard structured grid indices (Gi ; Gj ; Gk )
• 3D refinement level indices (Li ; Lj ; Lk )
The first set (Gi ; Gj ; Gk ) is defined as the set of equivalent structured cell indices when the entire grid is at
the refinement level of the current cell. The second set takes into account the refinement levels in the three
Cartesian directions. Cell dimensions can be calculated quickly and do not need to be stored. For example
the cell center coordinates are calculated as follows
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

 xc = Xo + (Gi − 12 ) · (DXo /2Li )




yc = Yo + (Gj − 12 ) · (DYo /2Lj ) (1)





zc = Zo + (Gk − 12 ) · (DZo /2Lk )

where (Xo ; Yo ; Zo ) are the coordinates of the west-south-bottom corner of the computational domain and
(DXo ; DYo ; DZo ) are the initial uniform grid spacings. In a similar way each cell face stores the pointers
to the cells it shares and two sets of integers are able to completely define the face geometry. The gridding
process can be summarized in the following steps:
1. a uniform Cartesian discretization of the computational domain is performed based on a desired far-
boundary cell size,
2. a geometric entity in the STL (Standard Tessellation Language) format is placed in the uniform grid
and a ray-tracing technique is used to detect the immersed surfaces,6
3. each cell is then flagged as fluid or solid with respect to the IB surface following well defined rules,
4. a automatic refinement of the IB cells is carried out in an anisotropic way using a recursive algorithm
until the desired near-wall dimensions have been obtained,
5. solid cells are discarded,
6. the X, Y and Z-normal directed faces are stored in different arrays,
7. the necessary near-wall metrics (normal unit vectors, distances,...) are stored to allow the proper
calculation of the IB fluxes.
The tagging procedure assigns a flag to each cell (cfr. fig. 2) based on the following definitions:
• Fully solid cell (f lag = −2) when the cell is not intersected by the geometry surface and the center
lies in the solid region,
• Fully fluid cell (f lag = 2) when the cell is not intersected by the geometry surface and the center lies
in the fluid region,
• IB solid cell (f lag = −1) when at least one of the neighbouring cells has a positive flag,
• IB fluid cell (f lag = 1) when at least one of the neighbouring cells has a negative flag.
The 3D refinement process involves only the IB cells that satisfy the following rules:
1. the difference in the refinement level in a given direction between a cell and its neighbours must be
less than or equal to 1,
2. a face must completely span at least one of its two cells.
A recursive algorithm has been developed to refine the near-wall IB cells in an anisotropic way by using
a dynamic linked list as container of objects. A tedious but simple routine is able to update each cell
connection during the splitting process assuring the correct reconstruction of the final LGR Cartesian mesh.
In fig. 3 two successive refinements are performed near a sphere surface. The final result is a grid file which
stores all the cell and face information by using only integers (low storage). An example of a wall-based grid
refinement around a sphere is shown in the fig. 4. In this case the sphere is made up of 18432 triangles and
the grid is obtained after 6 refinement levels. The refinement process can be based on other elements such
as
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(a) No refinement. (b) After one refinement level. (c) After two refinement levels.
Figure 3. Refinement process.
Figure 4. Wall-based grid refinement. Figure 5. Wing-body-tail configuration.
• a user-defined refinement window,

• a user-defined geometric curvature threshold,
• a user defined wave-front technique,
• an assigned flow field function.
An example of mesh around a complete wing-body-tail configuration is shown in fig. 5 to demonstrate the
capability of the automatic LGR grid generator.
IV. Flow Solver

The main feature of the flow solver is the face-based data structure which uses pointers for face-to-cell
connections.18 The necessary flux computations are obtained by looping on faces in an elegant vectorizable
way. The face-based IB apporach avoids ghost-cells and the related special treatment in proximity of sharp
interfaces (e.g. the sharp trailing edges of an airfoil).13 All the necessary geometric information is pre-
computed and stored at the start of execution avoiding unnecessary arithmetic operations during the iterative
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process. The use of dynamic memory allocation and vectorized loops make the algorithm very efficient in
terms of both computational costs and storage requirements.
A. Governing Equations
Consider a fixed 3D control volume Ω as the computational domain with its boundary ∂Ω having a normal
oriented vector:
n = nx i + ny j + nz k (2)
positive if outgoing. Let ρ, u, v, w and p denote density, Cartesian velocity components and pressure. The
set of conservative variables is given by:
T
Q = (ρ, ρu, ρv, ρw, ρE) (3)
where E = e + V 2 /2 and e are the total energy and the internal energy per unit mass respectively. The
integral form of the governing Euler equations can be written as:
Z I
d
Q dΩ = − F · n dS (4)
dt Ω ∂Ω
where F is the inviscid flux of Q through ∂Ω. The system is closed through the introduction of a thermo-
dynamic model. Perfect gas behavior of the fluid is assumed:
γ p
p = ρRT , h = cp T =
γ−1ρ
1 p
H = E + p/ρ , e = cv T =
γ−1ρ
where R is the gas constant, h is the enthalpy per unit mass, H is the total enthalpy per unit mass, cp is
the specific heat coefficient at constant pressure, cv is the specific heat coefficient at constant volume and
γ = cp /cv . The pressure can be written in terms of the conservative variables as:

1 2 2 2

p = (γ − 1) ρE − ρ u + v + w (5)
2
The inviscid flux F is:

     
ρu ρv ρw
     
     
     
 ρu2 + p   ρuv   ρuw 
     
     
     
F =  ρuv  i +  ρv 2 + p  j +  ρvw k (6)
     
     
     
     
 ρuw   ρvw   ρw2 + p 
     
     
     
u(ρH) v(ρH) w(ρH)
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B. Finite Volume Approximation
A finite volume cell-centered approach is adopted. The control volume Ω is discretized by means of N
hexahedra having normals oriented in the Cartesian directions such that:
N
X
Ω= Ωi (7)
k=1
where Ωi is the volume of a single Cartesian cell. Applying the set of equations (4) to the cell Ωi the following
discretized form is obtained:
d
Ωi Qi + Dci = 0 (8)
dt
where Qi is the i-th cell-center flow-state vector. The i-th convective flux balance Dci is defined as:
nbrs
X
Dci = fik (9)
k=1
where fik is the convective flux through the i-th cell face area Sik shared with the k-th neighbour cell:
Z
fik = Fik · nik Sik (10)
Sik
A 2nd order accurate in space Central Difference Scheme (CDS) is used. It can generate spurious modes
leading to non-physical oscillatory solutions. A scalar dissipation model is adopted19 and the following term
added to the eqn. (8):
nbrs
X
Dai = dik (11)
k=1
where
h i
(2) (4)
dik = λik εik (Qk − Qi ) − εik (4Qk − 4Qi ) (12)
The scaling factor λik is the spectral radius of the flux Jacobian matrix associated with the Euler equations
and is calculated by averaging the values from the two neighbouring cells i and k. The 4th order term reads
as
nbrs
X
4Qi = (Qk − Qi ) (13)
k=1
where the sum is extended to the neighbouring cells. The scaling factors related to the cell aspect-ratio are
also available to the algorithm.20 Moreover the Euler computations discussed herein use low-aspect-ratio
Cartesian cells which do not benefit from the anisotropic scaling. The artificial viscosity coefficients

(2) 1 (2)
εik = min , k max (νk , νi ) (14)
2
k (4)

(4) (2)
εik = max 0, − εik (15)
64
are adapted to the flow and are related to the shock sensor through
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nbrs
X |pk − pi |
νi = (16)
p k + pi
k=1
The νi sensor can be interpreted as a limiter switching from second order accuracy in smooth regions to first
order locally near the shock waves. Local time stepping and enthalpy damping accelerate convergence to
a steady state solution. The far-field boundary conditions are imposed by using one-dimensional Riemann
invariants or linear extrapolation methods based on the usual characteristic analysis.
C. Gradient Based Reconstruction

In the present Cartesian approach the local grid refinement feature poses the problem of cells having a
maximum total number of 24 neighbours ( 4 neighbours per face ). The simplest case is a cell with only
1 neighbour in a given direction. Thus a face center flow state variable value can be obtained by a one-
dimensional linear interpolation between the two sharing cell centers. When a cell has 2 to 4 neighbours this
procedure is not linearly exact. As mentioned previously, the 3D refinement process guarantees that a face
Figure 6. Face center reconstruction in the case of an LGR cell.
must completely span at least one of its two cells. This allows for a linearly-exact interpolation between the
two neighbouring cell centers. For example, the x-normal east face shown in the fig. 6 has a face center φe
value given by:

xe − xP ∂φ ∂φ
φe = φE + (ye − yE ) + (ze − zE ) + (17)
xE − xP ∂y E ∂z E

xE − xe ∂φ ∂φ
φP + (ye − yP ) + (ze − zP ) (18)
xE − xP ∂y P ∂z P
provided the cell-center gradients ( ∂φ ∂φ ∂φ

∂x , ∂y , ∂z ) are known. These can be computed by using the Green-Gauss
or a least-square reconstruction.16, 21
D. Immersed Boundary Approach

The proposed IB method consists of a discrete forcing approach with direct BC imposition. From the
previous cell-type definitions three different face-types can be identified:
• the far-field boundary face,
• the fully fluid face being the face sharing two fully fluid cells,
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• the IB face being the face sharing an IB fluid cell and an IB solid cell (see for example fig. 2).
The correct IB cell flux balance requires the flow-state vector Q at the center of both the fully fluid and the
IB faces. During the tagging process, the ray-tracing detects the PiIB intersection points in the Cartesian
directions along with the associated STL normal unit vectors. Both are associated with the corresponding
IB faces and thus it is sufficient to loop over them applying the correct boundary condition. Consider the
case of fig. 7 showing an IB cell with its x-directed normal IB face FxIB . The direct BC method consists of
Figure 7. Immersed boundary model: direct BC imposition.
imposing the correct fluxes on the the FxIB face in order to satisfy the Euler condition at the IB geometry
surface:
IB
(ρV) · n = 0 (19)
where V = (u, v, w) is the velocity vector. The following procedure is adopted to evaluate the flow state
vector Q at the generic FxIB face center:
1. momentum, pressure, and enthalpy per unit volume are linearly extrapolated to the IB surface (P IB
in fig. 7 ) from inside the fluid region,
2. subtract from the extrapolated IB momentum its normal component (the local IB normal unit vectors
are the STL ones):
h i
IB IB IB
(ρV)corr. = (ρV)extr. − (ρV)extr. · n n (20)
3. compute density from the other flow variables,
4. once Q is known at P and PIB points, the new gradient ∇QIB = ∇QIB (QP , QIB ) is used to calculate
the flow state vector at the IB face center (point P e in the fig. 7):
Qe = QIB + ∇QIB re − rIB

(21)
where re and rIB are the position vectors of the face-center and the immersed boundary point respec-
tively.
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The artificial dissipation flux at the IB faces is set to zero. Attention has been paid to the estimation of the
pressure at IB face center. One method is a linear extrapolation from inside the flow field. Another method
is to directly satisfy the 3D normal momentum equation at the IB wall13, 22, 23
IB 2
∂p 1 (ρV)corr.
= − (22)
∂n ρ R
where R represents the radius of the curve obtained by intersecting the geometry surface with the plane
containing the tangent to the local streamline velocity vector and the unit vector normal to the wall. Thus
IB
∂p
∂n is used for the IB face-center pressure extrapolation. An interesting feature of the face-based IB
Figure 8. IB face-based arrangement.
method is the absence of a special treatment for sharp interfaces (e.g. the trailing-edge of an airfoil or a
wing).13 The problem of doubly-valued ghost cells is, there, implicitly avoided. In the present work there
is a one-way coupling between the IB face and the corresponding STL unit normal vector. The negative
normal unit vectors associated to each IB face are shown in the fig. 8 for the NACA0012 trailing edge.
E. Solver Vectorization
The code is written in Fortran 90/95 and is organized to allow vectorization on a vector machine. As
mentioned above the cell flux collection is face-based. The main loop is not performed over the cells but
instead three different loops are performed over the x-, y- and z-normal directed faces thereby avoiding IF
constructs inside DO loops. A gather face-loop loads the flow variables from the neighbouring cells. The
fluxes at the face centers are evaluated and then distributed indirectly to the corresponding cells by using
the following scatter loop:
do n = 1, nfaces
a = a(n)
b = b(n)
RHS(a) = RHS(a) + flux(n)
RHS(b) = RHS(b) - flux(n)
end do
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The indirect addressing due to gather and scatter loops can be vectorized by using explicit compiler directives.
Usually the compiler prevents vectorization when an inner-loop indirect addressing is encountered. Great
attention is required to avoid catastrophic recurrences due to a forced vectorization. One method is to
subdivide each of three Cartesian face ensembles into 8 further groups such that no cell at which a flux
balance is being accumulated is referenced more than once in each face group. When looping over a single
face group, each cell receives a flux from only one face, thereby removing unwanted vector element cross-
dependencies. Thus a maximum number of 24 different loops are carried out. Dramatic improvements are
obtained in the CPU time resources which are aligned with those of a vectorized body-conforming structured
solver.24 Excluding input/output operations, the actual unstructured code attains nearly 99% vectorization
taking full advantage of the vector machine architecture.
V. Post-processing
An inverse distance weighting is used to interpolate the cell-vertex values φi from the neighbouring cell
center quantities φk :
X φk X 1
φi = / (23)
dik dik
k k
where dik is the distance between the i-th cell-vertex and the k-th neighbour cell center:
1/2
dik = (xk − xi )2 + (yk − yi )2 + (zk − zi )2 (24)
The pre-processor stores all the required information and thereafter the STL geometry is discarded. The
geometric surface quantities are the same as those used by solver for the IB face flux reconstruction. Each
IB face stores the Cartesian intersection point with the STL surface and the set of linearly interpolated
conservative variables QIB . By taking advantage of the unstructured face connections it is possible to build
up a triangulation starting from the pre-processed intersection PiIB points. By this way visualization of the
surface distribution of each flow quantity is straightforward. Note that the new triangulated geometry is a
function of the near-wall grid refinement and does not depend on the original STL triangulation.
VI. Numerical Results and Discussion

The simulation system has been tested on a variety of 2D and 3D Euler flows in subsonic and transonic
conditions. The robustness and the accuracy of the methodology are investigated by comparing the numerical
results with those from a body-conforming finite volume structured code24 and with analytic solutions
wherever available. The complete system algorithm has been originally developed for 3D applications and
subsequently extended to two-dimensional flows. In this case the number of cells in the span wise y-direction
is set to 1.
Uniform meshes have been used in the early validation of the baseline Cartesian method the results of
which are not reported here. All the computations discussed use a wave-front based refinement to capture the
near-wall gradients. The pressure correction eqn. (22) is adopted for the simulation of the flows around the
circular cylinder and the sphere. Characteristic boundary conditions are applied at the far-field boundaries.
A. Circular Cylinder
The two-dimensional flow past a circular cylinder of diameter D at a free-stream Mach number of M∞ = 0.1
is simulated. A potential flow exact solution is available. The computational domain consists of a box
extending 10D in both the x- and z-directions away from the body. The span-wise y-dimension is set to 1D.
The STL geometry consists of 9, 792 triangles. The initial uniform mesh is made up of 21 × 1 × 20 cells.
Three different grid refinement levels, are considered. The basic parameters of the final meshes are given
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in the Table 1. Note that 4f ar and 4wall represent the far-field and near-wall maximum cell dimensions
respectively. Only numerical results obtained on the finest grid (shown in the fig. 9) are presented. Full
Table 1. Basic parameters of the computational grids around the circular cylinder.
Grid coarse medium fine

4f ar 1.0 1.0 1.0
4wall 3.1250 · 10−2 1.5625 · 10−2 7.8125 · 10−3
Refinement levels 5 6 7
Total number of cells 6, 816 10, 356 17, 992
Number of IB fluid cells 92 184 364
Number of fully fluid cells 6, 724 10, 172 17, 628
convergence is obtained on every grid even when working near the stability limit of the scheme (e.g. fig. 10).
The flow field CP distribution, shown in the fig. 11, reveals the expected flow field symmetry. A few isoline
spots are visible at the refinement interfaces due to an artifact of the visualization interpolation method and
not due to the numerical scheme. A comparison of the surface pressure coefficient distribution between the
computed (red symbols) and the analytic potential flow solution (continuous line) is shown in fig. 12. Let
∂ΩIB denote the closed surface formed by all the IB x-, y- and z-normal directed faces. The net mass flux
through ∂ΩIB can be considered as an indicator of the error due to the slip-wall IB model. Ideally
Z
lim (ρV) · n dS = 0 . (25)
4wall →0 ∂ΩIB
The log-log of the net mass flux error versus the near-wall IB cell dimension is reported in the fig. 13. The IB
model is nearly 2nd order accurate in space. Further results for a free-stream Mach number of M∞ = 0.45,
is shown in fig. 14. The finest grid is used. The surface CP distribution is compared with the available
numerical data reported in the Ref. 25 for a body-conforming grid. The plot of fig. 15 indicates the good
shock capturing properties of the present method.
B. NACA0012 Airfoil
One of the aims of the simulation system is to accurately model flows around airfoil-type geometries. The
computational results for NACA0012 airfoil in two different flow conditions are presented:
• the subsonic flow at a free-stream Mach number of M ach = 0.1,
• the transonic flow at a free-stream Mach number of M ach = 0.82,
both at zero degree angle of incidence. The far-field boundary is located at 10 chords from the body. The
span wise y-dimension is set to 1D. The STL geometry consists of 9, 180 triangles. The initial uniform mesh
contains 4 × 1 × 4 cells which grow to 79, 784 cells after 9 refinement levels. The body surface is discretized
into 194 IB cells. Analogous computations have been carried out by using a body-conforming structured
solver.24 The multi-block structured grid used a slightly higher number of cells around the airfoil surface.
Partial views of these grids are shown in the Figures 16, 17. Comparisons of the two methods in terms of
surface CP distributions are visible in the Figures 18 and 19. Both Cartesian and body-conforming solutions
show the same behavior.
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C. Sphere
A 3D flow around a sphere of diameter D is simulated. A free-stream Mach number of 0.1 is used in
order to compare the numerical data with the potential flow solution. The geometry is an STL surface
made up of 18, 432 triangles “immersed” in a computational domain which extends 10 diameters from the
body in all of the Cartesian directions. Three different simulations are carried out corresponding to three
different refinement levels (see Table 2). Figure 20 shows the Cp distribution of the numerical solution on
Table 2. Basic parameters of the computational grids around the sphere.
Grid coarse medium fine

4f ar 2.0 2.0 2.0
6.25 · 10−2 3.125 · 10−2 1.5625 · 10−2
4wall
Refinement levels 5 6 7
Total number of cells 35, 648 81, 224 220, 688
Number of IB fluid cells 656 2, 520 9, 912
Number of fully fluid cells 34, 992 78, 704 210, 776
the underlying finest grid at the y/c = 0.5 cutting-plane. Discontinuous isolines are visible at the mesh-
refinement boundaries even if the solution does not have an unphysical discontinuity. As mentioned above,
this is due to a lack of the visualization process. Good agreement can be seen between the numerical and
the analytic flow field Cp distributions at the same y/c = 0.5 cutting-plane as shown in the fig. 21 Contour
plots of the computed CP and non-dimensional stream-wise velocity, at the x/c = 0.5 cutting-plane, are
placed side by side with those of the exact solution in the Figures 22 and 23.
The net mass flux through the closed surface ∂ΩIB (see fig. 24) versus the near-wall cell dimension is
plotted in fig. 25 for three different refinement levels. As for the cylinder case, the IB model spatial accuracy
is nearly 2nd order.
D. Onera M 6 Wing
The last application deals with the Onera M 6 swept wing. It has been investigated both experimentally
and numerically and is considered a standard benchmark to validate numerical methods. The plan form is
trapezoidal with an aspect ratio of AR = 3.8, a taper ratio of λ = 0.56 and a sweep-angle of Λ25% = 27.7◦ .
The tested geometry is the one used by the AGARD group-0726 to compare different body-conforming
techniques. The test flow conditions are:
M∞ = 0.84, , α = 3.06◦ ,
which correspond to the AGARD CASE − 11. The wing is mounted on the south-boundary of the compu-
tational box which extends 8 wing-root chords in the x- and z-directions and 4 in the span wise y-direction
away from the body. The domain mesh contains a total number of nearly 1, 500, 000 cells after 9 refinement
levels, starting from an initial uniform mesh of 4 × 1 × 4 cells. The wing surface consists of 13, 262 triangles
and is surrounded by 35, 590 IB cells. A symmetry boundary condition is enforced at the wing-root x − z
plane.
Local views of the solution pressure field along with the local background mesh are shown in fig. 26.
The wing pressure contours show the typical upper-side lambda shock. Comparisons between the present
calculations and the numerical data of Ref. 26 are made in terms of the surface pressure in three different
spanwise locations. The local pressure distributions are normalized with respect to the free-stream total
pressure P0 and plotted in fig. 27. Reasonable agreement is obtained with three of the reference data sets
13 of 22

at the y/b = 0.1 station in terms of leading edge pressure expansion and shock-wave position. A slightly
lower expansion peak is visible at the y/b = 0.5 station compared with the same reference data even if the
shock position seems correctly located. An under-predicted expansion peak is also present at the y/b = 0.8
station and the shock is located towards the middle of the published range. Poor grid resolution near
the sections’ leading edge is probably the cause of the low expansion in this region. Anyhow the above
results are encouraging and demonstrate the ability of the method in capturing the main characteristics of
a compressible 3D flow.
VII. Conclusions
A complete Euler flow simulation system based on Cartesian grids has been developed from scratch. The
proposed immersed boundary approach has proven to guarantee a local near-wall and overall 2nd order accu-
racy with good robustness properties in the subsonic and transonic flow regimes. A fully unstructured data
management approach is adopted due to its flexibility in treating the cell-refinement process together with
favorable memory and CPU requirements compared with classic body-conforming methods. A face-based
flux reconstruction permits a high level of vectorization thereby minimizing the CPU-times. Furthermore
any special treatment of doubly-valued ghost cells near sharp interfaces is avoided.
On the whole, the proposed method seems to satisfy the original motivations: a fast and flexible simulation
tool for engineering purposes. The IB approach is currently under further evaluation and validation. Future
work will include the development of a viscous version for Navier-Stokes applications.
VIII. Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Marcello Amato, Pier Luigi Vitagliano and Ainslie French for helpful dis-
cussions. The present research is running in the framework of the ACADEMIA project which is founded by
the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research.
References
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on Surface Modeling, Grid Generation and Related Issues in Computational Fluid Dynamics Workshop, NASA Conference
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Conf. on Num. Meth. in Fluid Dynamics, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg Germany., 1998.

3 Aftosmis, M. J., “Solution Adaptive Cartesian Grid Methods for Aerodynamic Flows with Complex Geometries,” March
1997, Lecture notes for 28th Computational Fluid Dynamics Lecture Series.
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Computer Graphics, Vol. 21, 1987, pp. 163–169.

5 Peskin, C. S., “Flow Patterns Around Heart Values: a Numerical Method,” Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 10,
1972, pp. 252–271.

6 O’Rourke, J., Computational Geometry in C , Cambridge University Press, 1998.
7 Iaccarino, G. and Verzicco, R., “Immersed Boundary Technique for Turbulent Flow Simulations,” Applied Mech. Review ,
Vol. 56, 2003, pp. 331–347.

8 Iaccarino, G., Kalitzin, G., Moin, P., and Khalighi, B., “Local Grid Refinement for An Immersed Boundary RANS Flow
Solver,” Reno, Nevada, 2004, AIAA Paper 2004–0586.

9 Peskin, C. S., “The Fluid Dynamics of Heart Valves: Experimental, Theoretical and Computational Methods,” Annu.
Rev. Fluid Mech., Vol. 14, 1981, pp. 235–259.

10 Mohd-Yusof, J., “Development of Immersed Boundary Methods for Complex Geometries,” Annual Research Briefs,
Center for Turbulence Research, 1998, pp. 325–336.

11 Fadlun, E. A., Verzicco, R., Orlandi, P., and Mohd-Yusof, J., “Combined Immersed-Boundary Finite-Difference Methods
for Three-Dimensional Complex Flow Simulations,” Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 161, 2000, pp. 35–60.
12 Kang, S., Iaccarino, G., and Moin, P., “Accurate and Efficient Immersed Boundary Interpolations for Viscous Flows,”
CTR Annual Briefs, pp. 31–43.
14 of 22

13 Dadone, A. and Grossman, B., “Further Developments in the Three-Dimensional Cartesian-Grid Ghost-Cell Method,”
Reno, Nevada, USA, 2006, AIAA Paper 2006–1085.

14 Mittal, R. and Iaccarino, G., “Immersed boundary methods,” Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech., Vol. 37, 2005, pp. 239–261.
15 Delanaye, M., Aftosmis, M., Berger, M., Liu, Y., and Pulliam, T., “Automatic hybrid-Cartesian Grid Generation for
High-Reynolds number Flows Around Complex Geometries,” Reno, Nevada, USA, 1999, AIAA Paper 99–0771.
16 Ham, F. E., Lien, F. S., and Strong, A., “A Cartesian Grid Method with Transient Anisotropic Adaptation,” Journal of
Computational Physics, Vol. 179, 2002, pp. 469–494.

17 Keats, W. A. and Lien, F. S., “Two-Dimensional Anisotropic Cartesian Mesh Adaptation for the Compressible Euler
Equations,” International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids, Vol. 46, 2004, pp. 1099–1125.
18 May, G., “Unstructured Alghorithm for Inviscid and Viscous Flows Embedded in a Unified Solver Architecture: F lo3xx,”
Reno, Nevada, 2005, AIAA Paper 2005–0318.

19 Jameson, A., “Numerical Solution of the Euler Equations for Compressible Inviscid Fluids,” MAE Report 1643, Dept. of
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, 1985.

20 Swanson, R., Radespiel, R., and Turkel, E., “On Some Numerical Dissipation Schemes,” Journal of Computational
Physics, Vol. 147, 1998, pp. 518–544.

21 Mavriplis, D. J., “Revisiting the Least-squares Procedure for Gradient Reconstruction on Unstructured Meshes,” NIA
Report 2003-06, NASA, 2003.

22 Tseng, Y. H. and Ferziger, J. H., “A ghost-cell immersed boundary method for flow in complex geometry,” Journal of
Computational Physics, Vol. 192, 2003, pp. 593–623.

23 Yang, J. and Balaras, E., “An embedded-boundary formulation for large-eddy simulation of turbulent flows interacting
with moving boundaries,” J. Comput. Phys., Vol. 215, 2006, pp. 12–40.
24 Catalano, P. and Amato, M., “An Evaluation of RANS Turbulence Modeling for Aerodinamic Applications,” Aerospace
science and Technology, Vol. 7, No. 7, 2003, pp. 493–590.

25 Jameson, A., Schmidt, W., and Turkel, E., “Numerical Solution of the Euler Equations by Finite Volume Methods Using
Runge-Kutta Time-Stepping Schemes,” Tech. rep., Palo Alto, California, 1981, AIAA Paper 1981–1259.
26 “Test Cases for Inviscid Flow Field Methods,” Ar–211, AGARD Working Group 07, 1985.
15 of 22

Figure 10. Cylinder case: fine grid convergence

Figure 9. Fine grid around the cylinder. history.
Figure 11. Cylinder case: flow field CP distribu- Figure 12. Cylinder case: surface CP distribution
tion at M ach = 0.1. at M ach = 0.1.
16 of 22

Figure 13. Cylinder grid convergence study.
Figure 14. Cylinder case: surface CP at M ach = Figure 15. Cylinder case: flow field CP at M ach =
0.45. 0.45.
17 of 22

Figure 16. NACA0012 airfoil case: partial view of Figure 17. NACA0012 airfoil case: local view of
the meshes used. the trailing edge meshes.
Figure 18. NACA0012 airfoil case: M ach = 0.1 and α = 0◦ . Comparison of the surface CP between the present
method and a body-conforming numerical solution (top). Present method: partial view of the flow field CP
(bottom).
18 of 22

Figure 19. NACA0012 airfoil case: M ach = 0.82 and α = 0◦ . Comparison of the surface CP between the
present method and a body-conforming numerical solution (top). Present method: partial view of flow field
CP (bottom).
Figure 20. Sphere case: partial view of the Figure 21. Sphere case: comparison between nu-
mesh and Cp distribution at the y/c = 0.5 merical and analytic CP distribution at the y/c =
cutting-plane. 0.5 cutting-plane.
19 of 22

Figure 22. Sphere case: contour map of the nu- Figure 23. Sphere case: contour map of the nu-
merical (left) and analytic (right) Cp distributions merical (left) and analytic (right) u/U∞ distribu-
at the x/c = 0.5 cutting-plane. tions at the x/c = 0.5 cutting-plane.
Figure 24. Sphere case: IB faces.

Figure 25. Sphere case: grid convergence study.
20 of 22

(a) Partial view of a x − z grid plane.
(b) Partial view of a y − z grid plane.
Figure 26. Onera M 6 wing at M ach = 0.84 and α = 3.06◦ . Pressure contours over the wing and pressure isolines
in two different grid planes.
21 of 22

(a) Surface pressure distribution at the y/b = 0.1 span- (b) Surface pressure distribution at the y/b = 0.5 span-
wise section. wise section.
(c) Surface pressure distribution at the y/b = 0.8 span-

wise section.
Figure 27. Onera M 6 wing: M ach = 0.84, α = 3.06◦ . Present method (symbol), body-conforming reference
methods (solid, dashed, dashed-dot, long-dashed).
22 of 22

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45th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit AIAA 2007-1450

8 - 11 January 2007, Reno, Nevada

A Compressible Flow Simulation System Based on

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

II. The Simulation System

• the setting of the integration domain boundaries

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

III. Data Management and Local Grid Refinement

• structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR),7, 8

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Figure 3. Refinement process.

Figure 4. Wall-based grid refinement. Figure 5. Wing-body-tail configuration.

• a user-defined refinement window,

IV. Flow Solver

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

The inviscid flux F is:

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

C. Gradient Based Reconstruction

Figure 6. Face center reconstruction in the case of an LGR cell.

provided the cell-center gradients ( ∂φ ∂φ ∂φ

D. Immersed Boundary Approach

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Figure 7. Immersed boundary model: direct BC imposition.

3. compute density from the other flow variables,

Qe = QIB + ∇QIB re − rIB

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Figure 8. IB face-based arrangement.

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

VI. Numerical Results and Discussion

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Grid coarse medium fine

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Table 2. Basic parameters of the computational grids around the sphere.

Grid coarse medium fine

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Conf. on Num. Meth. in Fluid Dynamics, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg Germany., 1998.

Computer Graphics, Vol. 21, 1987, pp. 163–169.

1972, pp. 252–271.

Vol. 56, 2003, pp. 331–347.

Solver,” Reno, Nevada, 2004, AIAA Paper 2004–0586.

Rev. Fluid Mech., Vol. 14, 1981, pp. 235–259.

Center for Turbulence Research, 1998, pp. 325–336.

CTR Annual Briefs, pp. 31–43.

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Reno, Nevada, USA, 2006, AIAA Paper 2006–1085.

Computational Physics, Vol. 179, 2002, pp. 469–494.

Reno, Nevada, 2005, AIAA Paper 2005–0318.

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, 1985.

Physics, Vol. 147, 1998, pp. 518–544.

Report 2003-06, NASA, 2003.

Computational Physics, Vol. 192, 2003, pp. 593–623.

science and Technology, Vol. 7, No. 7, 2003, pp. 493–590.

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Figure 10. Cylinder case: fine grid convergence

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Figure 13. Cylinder grid convergence study.

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Figure 24. Sphere case: IB faces.

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics