Preconditioned gridless methods for solving three-dimensional Euler equations at low Mach numbers

Abstract

In this paper, preconditioned gridless methods are developed for solving the three-dimensional (3D) Euler equations at low Mach numbers. The preconditioned system is obtained by multiplying a preconditioning matrix of the type of Weiss and Smith to the time derivative of the 3D Euler equations, which are discretized under the clouds of points distributed in the computational domain by using a gridless technique. The implementations of the preconditioned gridless methods are mainly based on the frame of the traditional gridless method without preconditioning, which may fail to have convergence for flow simulations at low Mach numbers, therefore the modifications corresponding to the affected terms of preconditioning are mainly addressed in the paper. An explicit four-stage Runge–Kutta scheme is first applied for time integration, and the lower-upper symmetric Gauss-Seidel (LU-SGS) algorithm is then introduced to form the implicit counterpart to have the further speed up of the convergence. Both the resulting explicit and implicit preconditioned gridless methods are validated by simulating flows over two academic bodies like sphere or hemispherical headform, and transonic and nearly incompressible flows over one aerodynamic ONERA M6 wing. The gridless clouds of both regular and irregular points are used in the simulations, which demonstrates the ability of the method presented for coping with flows over complicated aerodynamic geometries. Numerical results of surface pressure distributions agree well with available experimental data or simulated solutions in the literature. The numerical results also show that the preconditioned gridless methods presented still functions for compressible transonic flow simulations and additionally, for nearly incompressible flow simulations at low Mach numbers as well. The convergence of the implicit preconditioned gridless method, as expected, is much faster than its explicit counterpart.