Large-scale parallel unstructured mesh computations for three-dimensional high-lift analysis

A complete geometry to drag polar analysis capability for three-dimensional high-lift configurations is described. The approach is based on the use of unstructured meshes to enable rapid turnaround for complicated geometries that arise in high-lift configurations. Special attention is devoted to creating a capability for enabling analyses on highly resolved grids. Unstructured meshes of several million vertices are initially generated on a workstation and subsequently are refined on a supercomputer. The flow is solved on these refined meshes on large parallel computers using an unstructured agglomeration multigrid algorithm. Good prediction of lift and drag throughout the range of incidences is demonstrated on a transport takeoff configuration using up to 24.7×106 grid points. The feasibility of using this approach in a production environment on existing parallel machines is demonstrated, as well as the scalability of the solver on machines using up to 1450 processors.