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SUMMARY Conjugate heat‐transfer problems are typically solved using partitioned methods where fluid and solid subdomains are evaluated separately by dedicated solvers coupled through a common boundary. Strongly coupled schemes for transient analysis require fluid and solid problems to be solved many times each time step until convergence to a steady state. In many practical situations, a fairly simple and frequently employed fixed‐point iteration process is rather ineffective; it leads to a large number of iterations per time step and consequently to long simulation times. In this article, Anderson mixing is proposed as a fixed‐point convergence acceleration technique to reduce computational cost of thermal coupled fluid–solid problems. A number of other recently published methods with applications to similar fluid–structure interaction problems are also reviewed and analyzed. Numerical experiments are presented to illustrate relative performance of these methods on a test problem of rotating pre‐swirl cavity air flow interacting with a turbine disk. It is observed that performance of Anderson mixing method is superior to that of other algorithms in terms of total iteration counts. Additional computational savings are demonstrated by reusing information from previously solved time steps. Copyright © All rights reserved 2012 Rolls‐Royce plc.

The low speed flow through the shrouded de-Havilland Ghost centrifugal impeller is computed using an incompressible elliptic calculation procedure. The three dimensional viscous flow equations are solved using the SIMPLE algorithm in an arbitrary generalised coordinate system. A non-staggered grid arrangement is implemented in which pressure oscillations are eliminated using an amended pressure correction scheme. Flow computations are performed at ‘nominal’ low speed design and above design flow rates, and (on the coarse grids used in the calculations) good agreement is obtained with the experimentally observed jet-wake structure of the flow.

SUMMARYThe incompressible flow through a two-dimensional cascade is computed using the SIMPLE algorithm in a boundary-fitted co-ordinate system, With the standard staggered grid arrangement the numerical solution was found to allow localized pressure oscillations to persist adjacent to the periodic boundaries. These oscillations were found to be a consequence of the extended momentum control volumes which are required in this region of the cascade. Such control volumes may be removed by the use of appropriately non-staggered velocity storage locations, which are also desirable in the boundary-fitted system since the Cartesian velocity components are no longer related to the grid line orientations. However, this storage permits the propagation of global pressure oscillations, which were previously suppressed by the staggered grid arrangement. This paper attempts to define a solution procedure which uses non-staggered velocity locations and is able to eliminate the consequent global pressure oscillations. To achieve this aim, two forms of pressure correction scheme were considered. The first implemented the scheme proposed by Vanka et al. but was found to be inadequate in the open part of the cascade, whereas the second employed a modification of the scheme proposed by Rhie and Chow and was found to be successful in all regions of the flow. The results computed using this scheme were compared with the available experiment results.

The implementation of an integral transition model in a parallel unstructured computational fluid dynamics code is described. In particular, an algorithm for gathering the nonlocal boundary layer values (momentum thickness and shape factor) from parallel distributed computational domains is presented. Transition modeling results are presented for a flat plate and for a low pressure turbine, covering a large variation of Reynolds numbers, Mach numbers, turbulence intensities, and incidence angles. Contrary to fully turbulent simulations, transitional predictions are in very good agreement with measurements. Furthermore, the computational overhead of transitional simulations is only 7% for one multigrid cycle.