Acceleration of Compressible Flow Simulations with Edge using Implicit Time Stepping

Sammanfattning: Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has become a significant tool routinely used in design and optimization in aerospace industry. Typical flows may be characterized by high-speed and compressible flow features and, in many cases, by massive flow separation and unsteadiness. Accurate and efficient numerical solution of time-dependent problems is hence required, and the efficiency of standard dual-time stepping methods used for unsteady flows in many CFD codes has been found inadequate for large-scale industrial problems. This has motivated the present work, in which major effort is made to replace the explicit relaxation methods with implicit time integration schemes. The CFD flow solver considered in this work is Edge, a node-based solver for unstructured grids based on a dual, edge-based formulation. Edge is the Swedish national CFD tool for computing compressible flow, used at the Swedish aircraft manufacturer SAAB, and developed at FOI, lately in collaboration with external national and international partners. The work is initially devoted to the implementation of an implicit Lower-Upper Symmetric Gauss-Seidel (LU-SGS) type of relaxation in Edge with the purpose to speed up the convergence to steady state. The convergence of LU-SGS has been firstly accelerated by basing the implicit operator on a flux splitting method of matrix dissipation type. An increase of the diagonal dominance of the system matrix was the principal motivation. Then the code has been optimized by means of performance tools Intel Vtune and CrayPAT, improving the run time. It was found that the ordering of the unknowns significantly influences the convergence. Thus, different ordering techniques have been investigated. Finding the optimal ordering method is a very hard problem and the results obtained are mostly illustrative. Finally, to improve convergence speed on the stretched computational grids used for boundary layers LU-SGS has been combined with the line-implicit method.