ADIGMA: A European Project on the Development of Adaptive Higher Order Variational Methods for Aerospace Applications

Abstract

Computational Fluid Dynamics is a key enabler for meeting the strategic goals of future air transportation. However, the limitations of today's numerical tools reduce the scope of innovation in aircraft development, keeping aircraft design at a conservative level. Within the 3 rd Call of the 6 th European Research Framework Programme, the strategic target research project ADIGMA has been initiated. The goal of ADIGMA is the development and utilization of innovative adaptive higher-order methods for the compressible flow equations enabling reliable, mesh independent numerical solutions for large-scale aerodynamic applications in aircraft design. A critical assessment of the newly developed methods for industrial aerodynamic applications will allow the identification of the best numerical strategies for integration as major building blocks for the next generation of industrial flow solvers. In order to meet the ambitious objectives, a partnership of 22 organizations from universities, research organizations and aerospace industry from 10 countries with well proven expertise in CFD has been set up guaranteeing high level research work with a clear path to industrial exploitation. This paper gives on overview of the goals and the planned activities of the 3-years project.

Error Estimation and Adaptive Mesh Refinement for Aerodynamic Flows

“…Thereby, for reliable numerical predictions to be made by such methods, extremely fine meshes with a large number of degrees of freedom are required, which in turn leads to excessively large computing times. As an alternative approach, in recent years there has been significant interest in the development of high-order discretization methods; this is particularly evidenced by the funding of the EU Framework 6 project ADIGMA [82] (Adaptive higher order variational methods for aerospace applications) comprising of a consortium of academic and industrial partners. On a given mesh they allow for an improved prediction of critical flow phenomena, such as boundary layers, wakes, and vortices, for example, as well as force coefficients, e.g., drag, lift, moment.…”

Time Implicit High-Order Discontinuous Galerkin Method with Reduced Evaluation Cost

“…See for example [4,5,8,9,13,19,20,24,28,37,43] and references cited therein. For more details, the reader is referred to the analysis of existing discretizations in an unified framework developed by Arnold et al [3] and to the overview of recent progress in DG methods for compressible flows [32]. The success of these methods lies in their high-order of accuracy and flexibility thanks to their high degree of locality.…”

Heuristic a posteriori estimation of error due to dissipation in finite volume schemes and application to mesh adaptation

“…The questions arise: at what level of grid resolution (and corresponding level of error) does this occur, and is this in the range of engineering interest? An accuracy level of practical interest for cases such as this was recently defined by representatives of the aerospace industry within the European project ADIGMA (which is concerned with the efficiency of higher-order accurate methods [33]) as ±5 drag counts (±5 × 10 −4 ) and ±1/2 lift counts (±5 × 10 −3 ). Even if we conservatively demand ten times that accuracy, grid 2 for the subsonic NACA0012 case (with default dissipation coefficients) is sufficient, and for that grid the dissipation contributes all but 1/20th of the error.…”