SBIR-STTR Award

The main objective of this research effort is to develop a higher order unsteady turbulent flow solver based on the FDV method, and to exploit its attributes of spanning the whole Mach number range. The well known advantages of the implicit FEM will be inherited along with robust boundary conditions implementation and sound mathematical bases. Efficient parallelization, using MPI through domain decomposition and EBE solution, and supporting unstructured grids will make this effort a long-term investment tool, since all these gained advantages are desirable in virtually every NASA aerodynamics application. To this end, modularization of the in-house developed computer code will be extended to support higher order elements, namely; quadratic, cubic, and eventually spectral elements. The developed higher order code will be tested at various flow conditions starting from the incompressible limit to high supersonics, and including subsonics and transonics.

Accurate simulations of unsteady turbulent flows for aerodynamics applications, such as accurate computation of heat loads on space vehicles as well the interactions between fluids and structures is of utmost importance to the aerospace industry and NASA. Using a Finite Element Framework suited for both fluids and structures, we propose to continue building on the successes of Phase I by adding various turbulence solution methodologies as well additional multi-disciplinary physics to address complex problems with complex geometries, while maintaining high order accuracy of the framework.