A high-resolution fully compressible Navier-Stokes solver for analysis of moving objects at high Mach numbers

With this PhD project we developed, and we fully validated a high-resolution numerical model suitable for fluid mechanics simulations in a wide range of speeds and regimes. Nowadays, such topic - especially starting the development process from scratch - could seem in contrast with the availability of a large variety of highly- optimised and multi-platform fluid dynamics software. Among these, it is enough to mention the most famous commercial solutions like Ansys Fluent, Star-CCM+ and Comsol Multiphysics or the most employed open-source implementations like OpenFoam and NEK5000. Anyway, facing frontier engineering applications or fundamental topics in physics of fluids still represents a challenging task for all of these solutions. In particular, the aerodynamics problems in the transonic regime or the dynamics associated to the interaction between compressible flow and a moving structure require the researcher to be aware not only on the physics related to the problem but also to the numerics and the numerical implementation behind the model he is employing. This task is very far from the objectives of commercial software which aims to be as general as possible and user-friendly. Being easy to be used makes this software to be often opaque to the user and excessively conservative, implementing strongly diffusive numerical methods and highly-relaxing the numerical solution. Especially in the field of frontier applications, these methods often result in wrong predictions of the flow behaviour. Thus an ad-hoc numerical tool is required. For this reason, we developed URANOS. URANOS is a low-dissipative high-order and high-resolution numerical solver especially developed for fluid simulation in strong-compressible viscous conditions and able to deal with moving objects at high-Mach numbers.