Transonic Navier-Stokes wing solution using a zonal approach. Part 1: Solution methodology and code validation

Abstract : A fast diagonalized Beam Warming algorithm is coupled with a zonal approach to solve the three dimensional Euler/Navier Stokes equations. The computer code, called Transonic Navier Stokes (TNS), uses a total of four zones for wing configurations (or can be extended to complete aircraft configurations by adding zones). In the inner blocks near the wing surface, the thin layer Navier Stokes equations are solved, while in the outer two blocks the Euler equations are solved. The diagonal algorithm yields a speedup of as much as a factor of 40 over the original algorithm/zonal method coded. The TNS code, in addition, has the capability to model wind tunnel walls. Transonic viscous solutions are obtained on a 150,000 point mesh for a NACA 0012 wing. A three order of magnitude drop in the L2 norm of the residual requires approximately 500 iterations, which takes about 45 min of CPU time on a Cray-XMP processor. Simulations are also conducted for a different geometrical wing called WING C. All cases show good agreement with experimental data.