A PARALLEL ADAPTIVE CODE FOR COMPRESSIBLE NAVIER-STOKES SIMULATIONS

Abstract

The paper presents a finite element code for compressible flow simulations. The code has two important features: adaptivity to increase accuracy of computations by selectively refining a finite element mesh and efficient parallel performance due to a special implementation based on the concept of patches of elements. The algorithm for approximating the compressible Navier-Stokes equations is a version of the stabilized finite element method. Three time integration strategies are implemented, explicit, linear implicit and nonlinear implicit, and the GMRES method is used to solve the systems of linear equations. For parallel simulations the code uses a special algorithm for mesh partition. The performance of the code is tested for two examples of supersonic flows: one inviscid and one viscous.