In this work we investigate the Brinkman volume penalization technique in
the context of a high-order Discontinous Galerkin method to model moving wall boundaries
for compressible fluid flow simulations. High-order approximations are especially of
interest as they require few degrees of freedom to represent smooth solutions
accurately. This reduced memory consumption is attractive on modern computing systems
where the memory bandwidth is a limiting factor. Due to their low dissipation and
dispersion they are also of particular interest for aeroacoustic problems. However, a
major problem for the high-order discretization is the appropriate representation of
wall geometries. In this work we look at the Brinkman penalization technique, which
addresses this problem and allows the representation of geometries without modifying the
computational mesh. The geometry is modelled as an artificial porous medium and embedded
in the equations. As the mesh is independent of the geometry with this method, it is not
only well suited for high-order discretizations but also for problems where the
obstacles are moving. We look into the deployment of this strategy by briefly discussing
the Brinkman penalization technique and its application in our solver and investigate
its behavior in fundamental one-dimensional setups, such as shock reflection at a moving
wall and the formation of a shock in front of a piston. This is followed by the
application to setups with two and three dimensions, illustrating the method in the
presence of curved surfaces.
Introduction
In engineering applications we are often dealing with moving parts. When
investigating the fluid motion in those scenarios, we therefore, need to consider
complex, moving obstacles that influence or even drive the flow. In this work we look
into a method to realize moving obstacles in simulations with a high-order discontinuous
Galerkin scheme. High-order schemes need less number of degrees of freedom to represent
smooth solutions. On modern computing systems, where memory bandwidth is one of the main
bottlenecks, this is a big advantage. The discontinuous Galerkin method combines a
high-order local state representation within elements with a coupling of elements via
fluxes on the surface as in the finite volume method. This relatively loose coupling via
the element surfaces is a strong advantage on modern distributed parallel computing
systems, as only comparatively little data needs to be communicated between
elements.
Obstacles in such mesh-based schemes are usually represented by fitting the
mesh to the geometry and prescribed via boundary conditions. An alternative option is
the use of some immersed boundary method [22]. Immersed boundaries have the advantage that they do not require
the mesh to be fitted to the geometries that are to be represented. This is especially
attractive when considering moving obstacles as the movement does not necessitate a
change of the mesh.
In high-order discretizations it also becomes difficult to achieve an
accurate representation of the geometry by fitted meshes, due to the large elements that
we want to employ. With moving geometries the problem of fitting the mesh of a
high-order discretization to complex geometries gets magnified. Thus, immersed
boundaries are a promising choice for moving obstacles in a high-order discontinuous
Galerkin scheme. Comprehensive reviews of immersed boundary methods are available by
Mittal and Iccarino [22], Sotiropoulos and
Yang [27] and recently Maxey [21]. We use a penalization method as described by Liu
and Vasilyev [20].
Volume penalization methods introduce penalty terms in the continuous
equations, while imposing nothing in the discretization context [4]. Arquis and Caltagirone [5] introduced a type of volume penalization method for
simulations of isothermal obstacles in incompressible flows that makes use of the
Brinkman model for porous media. The basic idea is to model obstacles as a porous media,
where the porous medium approaches a solid obstacle. A distinct advantage this method,
in comparison to other penalization methods, is its error estimation, which can be
rigorously predicted in terms of the penalization parameters [24]. Kevlahan and Ghidaglia [15] used a pseudo-spectral method and applied this
Brinkman penalization method to model stationary, as well as moving geometries.
Liu and Vasilyev [20] used the
Brinkmann penalization method for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. They
introduced new penalization term for the mass conservation and showed promising results
for their acoustic setups. Several other successful investigations using different
numerical methods speak for the effectiveness of the Brinkmann penalization method.
Application in pseudo-spectral methods are found in [23] and [13]. In
[24] the Brinkman penalization is used
in the context of finite volumes and finite elements. To the authors knowledge, the
Brinkman penalization method used for compressible flows, either involves non-moving
obstacles or mostly considered for aero-acoustic problems e.g. in [18] or [20].
In [2] we applied the Brinkman
penalization in our high-order discontinuous Galerkin method for compressible
Navier-Stokes equations with non-moving obstacles. That analysis showed that the method
can be successfully used to represent obstacles even when using high-order schemes and
coarse elements. Thus, we now look into the application of this scheme to moving
geometries. Our implementation is available in our open-source solver Ateles
[26].
Numerical method
In the following we revisit the fundamental equations of compressible
viscous flows. With the continuum assumption fluid motion is modeled in terms of the
compressible Navier-Stokes equations. To model obstacles as immersed boundaries, we
extend those equations by Brinkman penalization terms as described by Komatsu et al.
[18]. With the introduction of the
penalization terms we also discuss their treatment in the time integration
scheme.
Compressible Navier-Stokes equations
Conversation of mass, momentum and energy applied to fluids leads to
the equation system that we refer to as compressible Navier-Stokes equations. In
conservative formulation with density \(\rho \), momentum \(\mathbf{m }\) and energy E the system can be
written as:
Equation (1a) represents
conservation of mass, (1b) conservation of
momentum and (1c) conservation of energy.
Velocity is denoted by \({\mathbf{u }} = {\mathbf{m }}/\rho \) and \({\mathbf{I }}\) indicates the identity matrix. The parameter \(\mu \) represents the dynamic viscosity of the fluid and \(\lambda \) the volume viscosity, assumed as \(\lambda = 2 \mu /3\) here. The temperature of the fluid is denoted by T and \(\kappa \) represents its thermal conductivity. Additional source terms, like
gravity, are represented on the right hand side of (1b) and (1c) by f. The equation system is closed by the equation of state
for the ideal gas that provides a relation between pressure p, temperature and density:
$$\begin{aligned} p = \rho R T = (\gamma - 1) \left( {E - {\rho {\mathbf{u }}^2}}\over {2} \right) . \end{aligned}$$
(3)
With \(\gamma = c_p/c_v\) denoting the heat capacity ratio and R the ideal gas constant as given in (4).
The volume penalization methods introduce additional artificial terms
to the equations to be solved in areas where obstacles are to be present. With the
Brinkman penalization method these appear as source terms on the right hand sides of
the equations. In [20] the Brinkman
penalization method was introduced for compressible Navier-Stokes equations. While
these included the possibility for moving obstacles, they were not Galilean
invariant. This was corrected by Komatsu et al. [18], resulting in the formulation we use in this scheme.
The equation system with the penalization terms is given in
(5).
Where \(\eta \) and \(\eta _{\tau }\) are the viscous and thermal permeability and \(\phi \) the porosity of the Brinkman model. Velocity and temperature of the
obstacle is given by \(U_{o}\) and \(T_{o}\), respectively and its location is defined by the masking function
\(\chi \). While the permeabilities only appear in source terms, the porosity
affects the divergence operators and thereby changes the Eigenvalues of the
convective system and necessitate smaller timesteps when considered in explicit time
integration schemes. The geometrical modelling can therefore primarily be influenced
by the permeability terms and the porosity. They allow to tune the modelling towards
a solid obstacle. Hence, they need to be chosen appropriately.
As we show in [2], it is
feasible to ignore the porosity, introduced by Liu and Vasilyev [20] for compressible fluids, if the permeabilities
are chosen sufficiently small. While the source terms get extremely stiff by tiny
permeabilities, this allows us to avoid any complications by the porosity in the
spatial divergence operators. The source terms are purely local and can be solved
pointwise. Thus, a implicit mixed explicit time integration is deployed to deal with
the source terms implicitly while the remaining parts are still solved explicitly. We
ignore the porosity by choosing \(\phi = 1\), which results in the following, simplified model:
To solve the source terms introduced by this penalization implicitly, we
use a diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta scheme [1]. In this work we make use of the values for the permeability
proposed in our analysis of the method for non-moving obstacles, see also there for
details on the time integration method [2]. We showed, that with a smaller value of \(\beta \) the modelling error can be decreased considerably, allowing to
neglect the porosity in the conserved quantities, as the permeability enables to
model solid obstacles. With the viscous permeability \(\eta = \beta ^2 \cdot \phi ^2\) and the thermal viscosity \(\eta _T = 0.4 \beta \cdot \phi \), the expected modelling error as described in [20] has a magnitude of \(\beta ^{1/4}\) for a porosity of 1. For our simulations we consider the outcomes
of Anand et al. and consider a scaling factor of \(\beta \le 10^{-6}\).
Representation of immersed boundaries
With the penalization method to represent obstacles, we can use the same
discretization technique for the obstacles as for the solution in our scheme. Thus
curvature of the geometries to represent poses no special problem as the discretization
of the obstacles can be chosen from the same realm as the solution. In the penalization
method, obstacles are given by the masking function \(\chi \). This function is one wherever an obstacle is to be modeled and zero
everywhere else.
An algorithm to find this polynomial representation of the masking
function for surfaces defined by polygons, for example in the form of STL files is
proposed in [17].
To discuss the representation of \(\chi \) in our high-order discontinuous Galerkin implementation on the basis
of Legendre polynomials we consider a simple one dimensional setup with a single
element. Figure 1a shows this single element and
the masking function that models a wall within that element. To the left with
\(\chi =0\) the fluid is to behave undisturbed, while to the right with
\(\chi =1\) the flow is to be penalized. This step function is mapped to the
polynomial space and uses a Legendre expansion with a maximal polynomial degree of 15.
The blue line illustrates the projection with an analytic integration, while the black
line indicates the resulting polynomial from a numerical integration with the shown 16
(Chebyshev) integration points.
Fig. 1
Immersed boundary (red) representation in polynomial space with 16
terms. Comparison of the numerical (black) and the analytical integration
(blue) for the masking function \(\chi \). Black dots represent the non-equidistant integration
points (Chebyshev nodes). a Wall location
between two Chebyshev nodes and b wall
location exactly at a Chebyshev node
With the numerical integration an error is introduced, as the jump of the
masking function \(\chi \) can only be determined up to the accuracy of the integration points.
This is illustrated more clearly in Fig. 1b,
which also clearly shows how this integration error depends on the location of the
discontinuity in relation to the integration points. When considering a continuously
moving wall, we will, therefore, see discrete jumps in the numerical representation of
\(\chi \) as the discontinuity moves across the integration point intervals. We
further note that, as the integration points are not equidistantly spaced, this
localization error is not constant, but depends on its location within the element.
Closer to the element boundaries the localization is more accurate than in the middle of
elements.
To decrease this error from numerical integration, we utilize
over-integration and use more integration points for the approximation [16]. In Fig. 2 we consider an over-integration factor of three. Comparing
Fig. 1b without over-integration and the same
case with this over-integration by a factor of three in Fig. 2, the improved representation of the wall location becomes apparent.
As Fig. 2 shows, an over-integration by factor
three already yields a polynomial approximation that is close to the analytical
integration. Another approach to improve the geometrical representation is introduced by
Engels et al. [7]. The authors assume the
masking function to be smooth by introducing a thin smoothing layer. This avoids the
strong discontinuity introduced by the jump of the masking function at the interface.
However, this approach does not improve the convergence in the vicinity of the geometry
surface.
Fig. 2
Masking function \(\chi \) (red) approximated in polynomial space with 16 terms.
Comparison of the numerical integration with over-integration by a factor of
three (black) and analytical integration (blue)
To investigate the penalization scheme for a moving geometry in our
discontinuous Galerkin implementation, we first analyze the fundamental behavior in a
one-dimensional setup. We look into the reflection of an acoustic wave from a moving
wall. Figure 3 sketches this setup with the
initial wave and wall positions.
Fig. 3
One-dimensional acoustic wave setup: The figure at top depicts
the initial position of the acoustic wave and the wall. Here v denotes the velocity of the wall, which is
set to \(v=0.01\). The domain to the right of the wall is penalized. The
amplitude of the pulse is \(\epsilon = 10^{-3}\). Bulk of the fluid moves along with the wall at
velocity v. The figure at the bottom
shows the final position of the wall and the pulse after \(t=0.5\) seconds. The pulse after reflection from the wall, has
reached the position \(x = 0.25\) and is seen to be travelling in the opposite
direction
The traveling wave has the form of a Gaussian pulse given by Eq.
(7). Its center is initially located at
\(x=0.25\), while the wall is located at \(x=0.5\).
The amplitude of the pulse is chosen to be \(\epsilon =10^{-3}\). The perturbations in density \(\rho '\), velocity \(u'\) and pressure \(p'\) from (7) are applied to a
constant, non-dimensionalized state with a speed of sound of 1. This results in the
initial condition for the conservative variables density \(\rho \), momentum m and total energy
e as described in (8).
where v is the background velocity
equal to the velocity of the moving wall.
The penalization with porous medium is applied in the right half of the
domain (\(x>0.5\)). In acoustic theory the reflection should be perfectly symmetric,
and the reflected pulse should have the same shape and size, only with opposite
velocity. After the simulation time of \(t=0.5\), with linear acoustic wave transport and a speed of sound of 1, the
position of the pulse will again be at a distance of \(d=0.25\) away from the position of the wall at that time. During this
duration, the wall travels a distance of vt to the
right, reaching the point \(x=0.5\). Therefore, the final position of the pulse has its center
\(x=0.25\) after the time interval t.
For the linear model we can easily compute the analytic solution and
use this to judge the quality of the numerical computation with the penalization
method. This simple setup allows us to analyze the dampening of the reflected wave
amplitude as well as induced phase shifts. While the analytical result for linear
wave transports provides a good reference in general for the acoustic wave with small
perturbation, it sufficiently deviates from the nonlinear behavior to limit its
suitability for convergence analysis in small error values. Therefore, we compare the
simulation results with the penalization method and moving walls to numerical results
with a traditional fixed wall boundary condition and a high resolution. This
reference is computed with the same element length, but the domain ends at
\(x=0.5\), which is the final position of the wall after \(t=0.5\) seconds, with a wall boundary condition and a maximal polynomial
degree of 255 is used (256 degrees of freedom per element) to approximate the smooth
solution. The pressure perturbation and the final position of the reflected wave (i.e
at time, \(t=0.5\)), for different orders, is shown in Fig. 4. The domain for all the simulations shown in the figure comprises
of 12 elements, i.e \(dx = 1/12\). Here, we can observe that both loss in wave amplitude as well as
phase shift of the reflected wave gets diminished with increasing orders. With
sufficiently large degrees of freedom, the wave shows an excellent agreement with the
reference solution. The error convergence is done in reference to this
solution.
Fig. 4
Plot for the pressure perturbation of the reflected wave at t =
0.5 for different orders. The numerical reference solution is obtained
with a traditional wall boundary condition and a high
resolution
Figure 5 shows the error
convergence in terms of the \(L^2\) norm over the maximal polynomial degree in the discretization
scheme (p-refinement) with a fixed number of 12 elements. We observe a linear
convergence rate with increasing polynomial degree, which matches the worst case
scenario from the analysis with a non-moving wall in [2]. As in the moving case the discontinuity of the masking function
\(\chi \) ranges through all locations of the elements, we can not expect a
better convergence rate.
Figure 6 shows the
\(L^2\) norm of the error for the reflected pressure wave with a maximal
polynomial degree of 7 over an increasing number of elements (h-refinement). Again a
first order convergence can be observed in the overall domain. The moving
discontinuity in the masking function eliminates the fast error convergence rate of
the high-order discretization close to the discontinuity. However, away from the
discontinuity we maintain the fast convergence rate and still expect benefits.
In Fig. 7 the computational
effort is shown for various spatial scheme orders. Figure 7a shows the error over the used number of degrees of freedom and,
thus the required memory consumption. And Fig. 7b shows the respective running times of the simulations on a
single computing node with 12 Intel Sandy-Bridge cores.
Fig. 7
\(L^2\) Error in the reflected acoustic pulse with respect to
computational effort needed. a On the
left: the \(L^2\) Error for various spatial orders over the required
memory in terms of degrees of freedom. b
On the right: same runs, but over the computational effort in terms of
running time in seconds. All simulations were performed on a single node
with 12 cores using 12 processes
The test was performed starting with 12 elements in each data series,
which is the leftmost point in the plot. For subsequent points in the series, the
number of elements are always increased by factor of 2. While we do not achieve a
spectral convergence as in a purely smooth solution, we still find the higher order
discretizations to be advantageous with respect to the required memory. In the
computational effort a strong improvement from second to fourth order discretization
is observed. However, for higher spatial scheme orders than 16, the required
computational running time increases again. Though this specific timing result is
tied to the system, the simulations were run on, we generally expect the running time
to be worse for higher orders in this metric on other computing systems as
well.
There are mainly two contributions to this error that diminishes the
convergence order. One cause is the Gibbs phenomenon that describes induced
oscillations due to the discontinuity in the masking function and the other is the
accuracy of the localization of the discontinuity from the numerical integration.
Both effects are illustrated in Sect. Representation of
immersed boundaries. The inaccuracy from numerical integration can
be limited by over-integration and using more points. The error from the Gibbs
phenomenon can also be limited by employing a re-projection method [10]. Though, such a re-projection method
potentially could restore the convergence up to the point of discontinuity, we do not
consider it here.
Reflected shock wave
While in the previous setup we looked into a smooth acoustic wave, we
now look into the reflection of a shock. We thus, not only have a discontinuity in
the masking function \(\chi \) but also in the solution itself. For the inviscid equations the
solution to this problem can be computed analytically. Thus, we will neglect viscous
terms in this setup and use the inviscid Euler equations. However, the same Brinkman
penalization is used to model the moving wall. The reflection of a shock at a fixed
wall with this method has been studied in [2]. Now, we move the wall similarly to the reflection of the
acoustic pulse in the previous section. Of course the shock incurs more problems with
a high-order discretization, nevertheless, this analysis shows that it is feasible to
use it in this setting.
The state variables downstream (indicated by 1) are listed in
Table 1. The upstream state is computed
via the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions for shock Mach number \(M_s\). The Rankine-Hugoniot conditions yield the following
relations:
for the relation of the densities \(\rho \). From these we can also find the pressure relation of before and
after (\(p_3\)) the reflected shock, see [3]. Additionally, the wall velocity \(w_s\) needs to be taken into account here, leading to Eq. (11) for the pressure relation.
With a shock wave Mach number of \(M_s = 1.2\) and a wall speed of \(w_s = 0.012\) the exact solution for the pressure relation across the reflected
shock wave is according to Eq. (11)
1.44911145. The simulation domain for this test case is the unit interval of
\(x \in [0,1]\) with the wall initially located at \(x = 0.49437415\). Hence the porous material covers at \(t = 0\) more than half of the simulation domain (\(x \in [0.49437415,1]\)). The initial shock position is \(x=0.24437415\) with a distance of 0.25 to the wall. The simulation is run until
the wall reaches \(x = 0.5\), the reflected shock is then at \(x=0.25\). Between wall and shock the fluid assumes the velocity of the wall
\(u_1=w_s\).
For our investigation, we consider four different numerical
discretization, 256, 512, 1024, and 2048 elements (n) in total (\(\varDelta x = 1/n\)) and a scheme Order (O) of 32, 16, 8, and 4, respectively. This
yields the same number of degrees of freedom (8196) across all runs. The penalization
parameters are chosen to be \(\phi =1\) and \(\beta = 10^{-6}\), the \(\beta \) value can be chosen that large as the numerical error is higher,
when compared to the modelling error. Figure 8 presents the reflected shock wave for the different spatial
resolutions. On the left in Fig. 8a the
overall pressure distribution is shown along with the piecewise constant reference.
As can be seen, all discretizations with the same number of degrees of freedom
provide a good approximation of the exact solution (indicated by the black line).
Thus, while the higher spatial scheme order does not offer a benefit in this scenario
with piecewise constant solutions, it still is quite capable to represent the
solution.
Fig. 8
Different curves represent different discretization for
different scheme orders and number of elements. a Normalized pressure of the reflected shock wave.
b Zoom of the reflected
shock
Figure 8b on the right shows a
close-up of the solution close to the reflected shock and shows the oscillatory of
the high-order approximation. These small oscillations were not observed in
[2] with a non-moving wall. Thus, they
are induced by the movement of the discontinuity in the masking function. As
described in Sect. Representation of immersed
boundaries, the wall position is not uniformly well represented,
which results in some oscillations as the discontinuity of the masking function moves
through the stationary mesh. Yet, the error from this effect is relatively small and
does not grow with higher scheme orders as shown in Table 2.
Table 2 Comparison of simulation results with the exact
solution
Table 2 shows the pressure
ratio (\(p_3/p_2\)) and the distance between the numerical shock and the exact shock
location. The pressure ratio in the numerical solution is obtained by averaging the
solution left and right of the shock. Apparently the pressure relation is captured
quite well by all scheme orders with this fixed number of 8196 degrees of freedom and
we observe an error of less than \(0.05\%\) with a decreasing tendency for higher spatial scheme orders. The
shock location in the numerical result is assumed to be at the middle point of the
jump, and again all simulations provide a good approximation of the reference shock
location. Again the highest scheme order yields the smallest error, but the trend is
not as clear as in the pressure relation. This can be explained by the approximately
same spatial resolution of the wall position in the numerical integration. With the
fixed number of degrees of freedom we also have a fixed average density of
integration points, which limits the accuracy of the wall position. However, in
comparison to the distance between wall and reflected shock (0.25) at this point, the
error is again negligibly small and in the largest case of the fourth order
approximation less than \(0.25\%\) of the distance to the wall.
Formation of shock: moving Piston
In the previous section we investigated the reflection of a shock at a
moving wall. Now we want to look into a shock that is formed by a moving wall itself.
A piston moves in a tube of fluid at rest. Ahead of it a shock will form and travel
away from the moving wall. Behind the piston a suction area will build up with a
rarefication traveling away from the moving wall. This one-dimensional setup is well
studied in literature [19] and the exact
solution for the inviscid equations is known. For this simulation we use a rigid
rectangular piston, modeled by the Brinkman penalization and moving with velocity
\(v_p = 150\) in a one-dimensional domain. The domain length L is set to 1.0 and the width of the piston is 0.04.
Initially, the piston is positioned at 0.4. The fluid is initially at rest, with
density \(\rho = 1.0~kg/{m^{3}}\) and pressure \(p = 10^5 Pa\). A time interval of 0.008s is
computed. This setup is particularly significant, as it indicates, whether
conservation is maintained by the wall model. A shock will not form, if conservation
is not maintained or will have a wrong speed, as a loss of conservation properties
occur [19]. We have a closer look into
the density and pressure. Important here is the correct capturing of the shock
position as well as the pressure and density relation behind and ahead of the formed
shock. The exact position of the shock after \(t=0.008 s\) is expected at \(x = 0.819870\), whereas the piston interface is located at \(x=0.56\) at the end of the simulation. During post-processing we apply a
smoothing filter that addresses Gibbs oscillations close to the shock [28]. As in the previous Sect. Reflected shock wave with the reflected shock, we
consider discretizations with different scheme orders (O) but with the same overall number of degrees of freedom. We use
spatial schemes of order O(4), O(8), O(16) and
O(32) with element counts (n) of n2048, n1024, n512 and
n256, respectively. Thus, the domain is
resolved by 8192 degrees of freedom in each case.
Fig. 9
Different curves represent different discretization using
different scheme orders and elements. a
Normalized density over the length of the domain. b Zoom of the shock area, in front of the
shock
The state of the simulation result after \(t=0.008 s\) is shown in Fig. 9 for the
density and in Fig. 10 for the pressure.
Once for the overall domain in Figs. 9a and
10a and once with close-ups of the shock
in Figs. 9b and 10b. The overall image shows that the state is well captured by all
scheme orders for this number of degrees of freedom. In the close-ups the shown grid
indicates the mesh for the fourth order discretization and discontinuities at the
element surfaces can be observed. The discretizations with higher spatial scheme
orders span accordingly multiple grid cells in Figs. 9b and 10b. In the run
with 32nd order a single element spans 8 of the shown 10 grid cells, all but the
outer left and outer right.
Fig. 10
Different curves represent different discretization using
different scheme orders and elements. a
Normalized pressure over the length of the domain. b Zoom of the shock area, in front of the
shock
As with the shock reflection in the previous section we find that the
high order can properly handle both the moving geometry and the discontinuity in the
solution. Thus, it is viable to use a high spatial scheme order in the complete
domain, across discontinuities in state and masking function without special
measures.
Subsonic cylinder movement
We now move on to a two-dimensional test case, where we consider the
movement of a cylinder through a fluid with a low velocity. As a reference for this
simulation, we use the simulation of a cylinder at rest within a fluid moving with a
higher velocity. In this setup we neglect again the viscosity and only solve the
penalized compressible Euler equations. We define the simulation domain with an
extent of \([4d \times 4d]\) where d is the diameter of the
cylinder. In the reference solution the fixed cylinder is put in the center of the
domain. Accordingly, the moving cylinder is put initially shifted from a center such
that it reaches the center of the domain after a simulation time of 0.04s. The relative motion between cylinder and fluid has a
Mach number of \(Ma=0.5\). In the reference computation this defines the velocity of the
fluid around the cylinder in rest. For the moving cylinder we split the velocity
parts and have the cylinder move with half the velocity difference \(Ma=0.25\) upstream through the fluid that has a velocity of \(Ma=0.25\).
Figure 11 sketches the
simulation domain. In the case of the moving cylinder, the cylinder is initially
slightly shifted towards the right (dashed line cylinder) and moves to the left
during the simulation. The fluid moves from left to right in both
computations.
Fig. 11
Sketch of domain with cylinder, the non-moving cylinder (solid
line) is located at the center and the moving cylinder (dashed line) is
initially shifted slightly to the right
In the simulation we use a spatial scheme order of O(16) with three different meshes. The coarsest mesh (L8)
uses \(64 \times 64 = 4096\), the intermediate (L9) \(128 \times 128 = 16384\) and the finest (L10) \(256 \times 256 = 65536\) elements. We compare the solutions by measuring the pressure along
the surface of the cylinder with a resolution of one degree. In Fig. 12 all three mesh resolutions (L) for the moving
cylinder are shown. We can observe how the pressure, normalized by the background
pressure converges with finer mesh resolution. For the mesh refinement L9 and L10 the
normalized pressure at the stagnation point is almost the same. Additionally, in all
three cases we can clearly observe the decrease of the pressure value at the
stagnation point, as the resolution becomes better. Thus, also the representation of
the cylinder.
Fig. 12
Comparison: Moving cylinder for different mesh refinement levels
(L) over the angle. a Surface pressure
of the cylinder geometry over the angle for different mesh resolutions.
b Zoom-in of the stagnation area
(maxima)
Comparison: Moving (M) and non-moving (NM) cylinder for mesh
refinement levels L10 over the angle. a
Surface pressure of the cylinder geometry over the angle. b Zoom-in of the stagnation area
(maxima)
In Fig. 13 we compare the
solution in normalized pressure for the mesh refinement level L10 for the moving (M)
and non-moving (NM) cylinder (cf. Fig. 13a).
The pressure behavior for both cases is very close and in agreement with each other.
We can observe a slight shift in the stagnation point between both solutions (cf.
Fig. 13b), which is again due to the
movement of the cylinder and the different representation in each time step. However,
apart from that, both curves show the same behavior in pressure and are in very good
agreement.
Fig. 14
Cylindrical geometry moves from an initial location near the
outflow towards the inflow with a relative Ma = 3.0. The movement is
captured showing the density after a
0.35 s, b 0.5 s, c 0.8 s, d 1.2 s and
e 1.5 s
In this section we increase the velocity of the moving cylinder to
reach the supersonic regime, where we again see shocks in the flow, but now in a
two-dimensional simulation. The simulation domain is rectangular of the form
\([L \times H]\) with the length \(L = 4 \cdot H\) and H is the height of the
domain. The cylinder is 1/4 of the height of the domain and has a diameter of
\(d = 0.25\) m. Initially the cylinder is located close to the right boundary
(outlet) and moves with Mach 1.5 towards the left boundary (inlet). The fluid has a
velocity of Mach 1.5 towards the right, resulting in a total relative velocity
between fluid and obstacle of Mach 3. Upper and lower boundaries are set to slip
walls. This setup is also described in a report by P. Hu et al. [12]. The mesh has elements of the length 1/128
resulting in 65536 elements in total. We solve the inviscid Euler equations with a
spatial scheme order of six.
Figure 14 shows the density
for various positions of the cylinder at consecutive points in time. Ahead of the
cylinder the formation of a bow shock can be observed (cf. Fig. 14a–e). The shock is sharply resolved and drastic
change in state can be observed in this supersonic setting. In Fig. 14a we can observe the interaction of the bow shock
with the walls. The shock is reflected at the upper and lower wall. Besides the
interaction of the shock with the wall, we can observe the interaction of the
reflected shock with vortices in the wake of the obstacle (cf. Fig. 14d, e). Further, we can nicely observe the structure
of a Richtmyer-Meshkov instability behind the shock along the walls. All figures show
a good resolution of the flow features, as small structures are clearly visible. The
cylindrical geometry is well modeled and its movement causes the expected physical
phenomena. Our results are in good agreement with the report of Hu et al.
[12]. However, we can observe that
small scale structures are more clearly resolved in the presented high-order
simulation here. This highlights the advantage of high-order methods even with
discontinuities present in the solution. It also shows, that the Brinkman
penalization can successfully be used in the supersonic regime.
Fig. 15
Rotation of a fan composed by three NACA0012 airfoil profiles.
The depicted pressure is normalized by the background pressure. The
rotational movement is captured after: a
5s, b 10s, c 15s and
d 20s. The normalized pressure is shown in the background. The
streamlines (white) illustrate the velocity flow pattern
This three dimensional test case is solved with the full compressible
viscous Navier-Stokes equations. The setup features a rotating fan, that is composed
by three NACA0012 airfoils with a chord length of 1m. The first blade is initially positioned at an angle of
\(90^\circ \), the second one at \(210^{\circ }\) and the third at \(330^\circ \). The pressure is set to 1bar,
the density to \(1 kg/m^{3}\) and the fluid is initially at rest. The fan rotates with a
frequency of 6.283Hz. The Reynolds number with
respect to the chord length is 67, 114. The kinematic viscosity is defined to be
\(1.49 \cdot 10^{-5} m^2/s\) and the thermal conductivity is set to \(0.024 W/(m \cdot K)\). All lengths are normalized by the cord length. The computational
domain is of size \([10 \times 10 \times 2]\) unit length and the mesh consists of a total of 102400 cubical
elements with an edge length of 1/8m. A spatial
scheme order of O(6) is used on this mesh. The fan
rotates counter-clockwise around its center point at P(0, 0, 1) of the domain. In Fig. 15 the time evolution of the rotating fan is shown after 5s, 10s, 15s and 20s from Fig.
15a to d respectively. The pressure,
normalized by the background pressure is shown as a color field, while white
streamlines illustrate the velocity pattern in the vicinity of the rotating obstacle.
Three strong vortices appear, that are due to the sudden movement of the fan in the
initially not moving fluid. Those are still visible in 15d, but are far from the obstacle at that point and the influence
from the initial condition vanishes. Clearly the meeting point of high and low
pressures at the tip of the blades can be observed. Resulting pressure waves are well
resolved and propagated through the domain forming the depicted spiral pattern. The
three vortices from the start-up travel towards the outer boundaries, disturbing the
outgoing pressure waves (cf. Fig. 15b to d).
Between the fan blades the streamlines illustrate how the flow is captured in
circulation areas confined by the blades. The geometry is well represented and the
observed behavior is in agreement with the expectations. The simulation was conducted
on Germans national supercomputer JUWELS located in Jülich Supercomputing Center
using 15k core-h. Each compute node on the system is equipped with 48 cores
[14].
Collision of three spheres
The three-dimensional test case is solved with the compressible Euler
equations. The simulation domain has a length of \(L = 4~m\), a height of \(H = 4~m\) and a width of \(W = 1.5\) m. Three spheres are located in the domain, that are at the
beginning of the simulation in contact with each other at their respective
interfaces. The first sphere is located at \(S_1 (-0.1, 0.0, 0.0)\) and has a radius of 0.2 m, the
second and third sphere have a radius of 0.15 m and are located at \(S_2(0.0, 0.45, 0.0)\) and \(S_3(0.0, 0.0, -0.45)\) respectively. All spheres move with a predefined cosine function,
away from each other and towards each other, that is defined as \(A\cdot cos{2\pi t}\) with A being the amplitude,
which is 0.1. The Euler equations are solved with a scheme order of O(8). The fluid is in rest, the pressure is defined to be
1 bar and the density is \(1~kg/m^3\). The computational mesh has 98304 elements, with an edge length of
1/16 m. The simulation is carried out for 10 s. In
z-direction the computational domain is periodic. In Figure 16 different positions of the spheres at different
points in time are shown. Figure 16a
illustrates the spheres at their maximum position, with the largest distance to each
other after 9.5 s. The spheres move from that
position again back to their original location, that is shown in Fig. 16b (after 9.8 s).
As expected, the fluid is compressed between the spheres, resulting in high velocity
value on the right and left of the spheres, as the fluid is squeezed out from the
region between them. Finally, the spheres reach their respective position in
Fig. 16, where their interfaces get in
contact with each. It needs to be highlighted, that the numerical scheme is able to
handle the collision of objects, without further stability restrictions. Furthermore,
the presence of multiple moving geometries can be handled accordingly by the solver
and the method used to model the geometries.
Fig. 16
Collision of three spheres at different simulation time, when
a the spheres are at their respective
maximum position after 9.5 s. In
b spheres move towards each other
after 9.8 s and c spheres get in contact with each other at their
respective interfaces after 10 s
In Fig. 17 the Q-criterion of
7.0 is shown for the time 9.6 s, when the spheres
move again back to their origin. Again, high velocity values can be observed in the
region between the spheres, where the fluid is compressed. Small structures appear
close and away from the spheres, where the fluid is disturbed by the movement of the
three geometries. Please note that simulation results provided by the solver are
represented by polynomial series. For visualization purposes this representation is
voxelized during post-processing. Therefore, the spheres in Fig. 16a appear relatively rough, as the voxelization was
done in a coarse resolution for the geometry here, while the sliced data of the flow
state is resolved to a finer level.
Fig. 17
Contour plot showing the Q-criterion of 7.0 after 9.6 s simulation time. The contours are coloured
by the velocity magnitude
We applied the Brinkman penalization method in our modal discontinuous
Galerkin implementation Ateles and the presented analysis shows that it offers an
effective method to model moving obstacles. While the convergence order breaks down at
the discontinuity of the masking function for the penalization, the accuracy is still
high in the remaining domain and overall not worse than with a lower order
discretization. Thus, the complete domain can be computed with the same discretization
without the need to adapt to the moving obstacles. The Brinkman penalization scheme
worked in our implementation for smooth flow states like a reflected acoustic wave as
well as for shocks. It is working in the subsonic and supersonic regimes and independent
of the location of obstacles relative to the mesh. Small and closing gaps between moving
parts can effortlessly modelled up to the contact of obstacles.
We observe small scale oscillations in the solution that are not present
in simulations with fixed walls, but they remain small and decrease with better
resolutions. An over-integration in the representation of the masking function is
necessary and we found that an over-integration by a factor of three is sufficient to
mostly recover an accurate geometrical approximation. The presented method enables us to
model moving geometries of arbitrary shape within a high-order discontinuous Galerkin
scheme and provides a large flexibility in its application.
Further improvements could be offered by incorporating re-projection
methods that promise the reconstruction of error convergence even in the vicinity of
discontinuities e.g. in [8].
Availablity of data
All configuration files for the shown test cases are available in [6] and can be run with our open-source simulation
framework APES [25] for pre- and post-processing.
Change history
21 May 2021
The error in the running head has been corrected now.
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Simulation results were obtained on the Noctua system at Paderborn Center for
Parallel Computing (PC2) and the Supermuc-NG supercomputer at Leibniz Rechenzentrum
(LRZ) of Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. The authors wish to thank for the
computing time and the technical support.
Funding
Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. N. Ebrahimi Pour was
financially supported by the priority program 1648–Software for Exascale Computing 214
(www.sppexa.de) of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
University of Siegen, 57076, Siegen, Germany
Neda Ebrahimi Pour, Nikhil Anand, Harald Klimach & Sabine Roller
Conceptualization by NEP and HK; NEP wrote the original draft preparation and
NA contributed the pulse reflection setup; all authors were involved in the review and
editing process; NA, NEP and HK worked on the methodology; NEP and HK worked on the used
software; investigation and validation was carried out by NA and NEP, they also did the
visualization to produce the graphs and images. Supervision and funding acquisition by
SR. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in
the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in
the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.
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Appendix
Appendix
The discontinuous Galerkin discretization
This section is devoted to a brief review, of the semi-discrete form
of the discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element method (DG) for compressible flows.
For brevity we restrict this discussion to the inviscid part. The vicsous terms
are discretized using the DG method with symmetric interior penalty [11]. We refer to the equations obtained by
neglecting diffusive terms from the compressible Navier-Stokes equations as the
Euler equations. They provide a model for the conservation of mass, momentum and
energy of the fluid and are defined in vectorial notation by
with respective initial and boundary conditions. \({\mathbf{u }}\) is a vector, that includes all variables to be conserved.
Further the flux function \({\mathbf{F }}({\mathbf{u }}) = ({\mathbf{f }}({\mathbf{u }}), {\mathbf{g }}({\mathbf{u }}))^T\) is defined for the spatial dimensions and is in 2D given
by
$$\begin{aligned} {\mathbf{u }} = \left[ \begin{array}{c} \rho \\ \rho u \\ \rho v \\ \rho E \\ \end{array} \right] , \quad {\mathbf{f }}({\mathbf{u }}) = \left[ \begin{array}{c} \rho u \\ \rho u^{2} +p \\ \rho uv \\ (\rho E + p)u \\ \end{array} \right] , \quad {\mathbf{g }}({\mathbf{u }}) = \left[ \begin{array}{c} \rho v \\ \rho uv \\ \rho v^{2} +p \\ (\rho E + p) v \\ \end{array} \right] , \end{aligned}$$
with density \(\rho \), velocity \({\mathbf{v }} = (u,v)^T\), specific total energy E, and
pressure p. The system is closed by the
equation of state. Which for an ideal gas provides \(p = (\gamma -1) \rho \left( e - \frac{1}{2} ( u^{2} + v^{2} )\right) \). Here \(\gamma = \frac{c_p}{c_v}\) is the ratio of specific heat capacities and e is the total internal energy per unit mass.
The discontinuous Galerkin formulation of the mentioned equation is
obtained, by multiplication with a test function \(\psi \) and integration over the domain \(\varOmega \). Afterward, we apply integration by parts and obtain the weak
formulation
Where ds denotes a segment on the
surface integral. The overall domain \(\varOmega \) is split into smaller, n
non-overlapping elements \(\varOmega _i| i = 1,2,\ldots , n\), such that \(\varOmega = \cup _{i=1}^{n} \varOmega _i\) and \(\varOmega _i \cap \varOmega _j = \emptyset \forall i \ne j\). Within in each of these elements a polynomial series
\(P^m\) with a maximal degree of \(m \ge 0\) is used to approximate the solution \({\mathbf{u }}\). We refer to this approximate solution as \( {\mathbf{u }}_h ({\mathbf{x }},t)\), in each element i.
The expansion coefficients \({\hat{u}}_i\) are the degrees of freedom of the numerical solution. It is
important to keep in mind, that no global continuity requirement for
\({\mathbf{u }}_h\) in the previous definition is needed. Dividing the integrals in
Eq. (14) into a sum of integrals over
elements \(\varOmega _i\), we can obtain the space-discrete variational formulation with
test functions \(\psi _j\) in each element
By using \(m+1\) linearly independent test functions \(\psi _0, \ldots , \psi _m\) we arrive at a fully determined linear system of \(m+1\) equations for the \(m+1\) degrees of freedom. The appearing inner products of
\(\phi _i\) and \(\psi _j\), can be precomputed and we can represent the system in the form
of matrices that are multiplied with the degrees of freedom \(\hat{{\mathbf{u }}}\) representing the state. Since the numerical representation is
only supported locally, the flux term is not uniquely defined at the element
interfaces. Thus, the flux function has to be replaced by an approximative
numerical flux function \({\mathbf{F }}^*({\mathbf{u }}_h^-, {\mathbf{u }}_h^+, {\mathbf{n }} )\), where \({\mathbf{u }}_h^-\) and \({\mathbf{u }}_h^+\) are the interior and exterior traces at the element face in the
normal direction \({\mathbf{n }}\) to the interface.
To simplify the above equation, we can re-write it in a matrix
vector notation as
Hereby M,S are the mass and the stiffness matrices and \(M^F\) are the so called face mass lumping matrices. The computational
cost to perform these operations obviously depends on the choice of basis
functions. Using the orthogonality of Legendre polynomials the mass matrix gets
diagonalized and trivially invertable, such that the multiplication with
\(M^{-1}\) can be performed in \({{\mathscr {O}}}(m+1)\) operations. The stiffness matrix is not as trivially applied,
however due to the recursive properties of the Legendre polynomials it can still
be computed in \({{\mathscr {O}}}(m+1)\) operations by exploiting this recursiveness.
The obtained ordinary differential equations (17) can be solved in time using any standard
time-stepping method, e.g. a Runge-Kutta method [2]. In our DG discretization, we usually employ the HLL flux as
numerical flux.
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Ebrahimi Pour, N., Anand, N., Klimach, H. et al. Compressible flow simulation with moving
geometries using the Brinkman penalization in high-order Discontinuous
Galerkin.
Adv. Model. and Simul. in Eng. Sci.8, 10 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40323-021-00195-4