Adaptive simulation of turbulent flow past a full car model

Abstract

The massive computational cost for resolving all turbulent scales makes a direct numerical simulation of the underlying Navier-Stokes equations impossible in most engineering applications. We present recent advances in parallel adaptive finite element methodology that enable us to efficiently compute time resolved approximations for complex geometries with error control. In this paper we present a LES simulation of turbulent flow past a full car model, where we adaptively refine the unstructured mesh to minimize the error in drag prediction. The simulation was partly carried out on the new Cray XE6 at PDC/KTH where the solver shows near optimal strong and weak scaling for the entire adaptive process.