A Parallel Navier Stokes Solver for Natural Convection and Free Surface Flow

Abstract

A parallel numerical method has been implemented for solving the Navier Stokes equations on Cartesian and non-orthogonal meshes. To ensure the accuracy of the code first, second and third order differencing schemes, with and without flux-limiters, have been implemented and tested. The most computationally expensive task in the code is the solution of linear equations, and a number of linear solvers have been tested to determine the most efficient. Krylov space, incomplete factorisation, and other iterative and direct solvers from the literature have been implemented, and have been compared with a novel black-box multigrid linear solver that has been developed both as a solver and as a preconditioner for the Krylov space methods. To further reduce execution time the code was parallelised, after a series of experiments comparing the suitability of different parallelisation techniques and computer architectures for the Navier Stokes solver. The code has been applied to the solution of two classes of problem. Two natural convection flows were studied, with an initial study of two dimensional Rayleigh Benard convection being followed by a study of a transient three dimensional flow, in both cases the results being compared with experiment. The second class of problems modelled were free surface flows. A two dimensional free surface driven cavity, and a two dimensional flume flow were modelled, the latter being compared with analytic theory. Finally a three dimensional ship flow was modelled, with the flow about a Wigley hull being simulated for a range of Reynolds and Froude numbers.