A Sliding Interface Method for Unsteady Unstructured Flow Simulations

Blades, E. L., & Marcum, D. (2007). A Sliding Interface Method for Unsteady Unstructured Flow Simulations. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering. Wiley InterScience. 53(3), 507-529.

Abstract

The objective of this work is to develop a sliding interface method for simulations involving relative grid motion that is fast and efficient and involves no grid deformation, remeshing, or hole cutting. The method is implemented into a parallel, node-centered finite volume, unstructured viscous flow solver. The rotational motion is accomplished by rigidly rotating the subdomain representing the moving component. At the subdomain interface boundary, the faces along the interface are extruded into the adjacent subdomain to create new volume elements forming a one-cell overlap. These new volume elements are used to compute a flux across the subdomain interface. An interface flux is computed independently for each subdomain. The values of the solution variables and other quantities for the nodes created by the extrusion process are determined by linear interpolation. The extrusion is done so that the interpolation will maintain information as localized as possible. The grid on the interface surface is arbitrary. The boundary between the two subdomains is completely independent from one another; meaning that they do not have to connect in a one-to-one manner and no symmetry or pattern restrictions are placed on the grid. A variety of numerical simulations were performed on model problems and large-scale applications to examine conservation of the interface flux. Overall solution errors were found to be comparable to that for fully connected and fully conservative simulations. Excellent agreement is obtained with theoretical results and results from other solution methodologies.