An assessment of architecturally appealing, semi-open shock mitigation devices

Purpose – Limitations in space and city planning constraints have led to the search for alternative shock mitigation devices that are architecturally appealing. The purpose of this paper is to consider a compromise solution which consists of partially open, thick, bending-resistant shapes made of acrylic material that may be Kevlar- or steel-reinforced. Seven different configurations were analyzed numerically. Design/methodology/approach – For the flow solver, the FEM-FCT scheme as implemented in FEFLO is used. The flowfields are initialized from the output of highly detailed 1-D (spherically symmetric) runs. Peak pressure and impulse are stored and compared. In total, seven different configurations were analyzed numerically. Findings – It is found that for some of these, the maximum pressure is comparable to usual, closed walls, and the maximum impulse approximately 50 percent higher. This would indicate that such designs offer a blast mitigation device eminently suitable for built-up city environments. Research limitations/implications – Future work will consider fully coupled fluid-structure runs for the more appealing designs, in order to assess whether such devices can be manufactured from commonly available materials such as acrylics or other poly-carbonates. Practical implications – This would indicate that such designs offer a blast mitigation device eminently suitable for built-up city environments. Originality/value – This is the first time such a semi-open blastwall approach has been tried and analyzed

On the simulation of dropletization

Compressible and near-incompressible solvers, together with particle update techniques and chemistry packages are combined in order to compute complex multiphase flows that include dropletization, vaporization and subsquent combustion

A hybrid building‐block and gridless method for compressible flows

A hybrid building‐block Cartesian grid and gridless method is presented to compute unsteady compressible flows for complex geometries. In this method, a Cartesian mesh based on a building‐block grid is used as a baseline mesh to cover the computational domain, while the boundary surfaces are represented using a set of gridless points. This hybrid method combines the efficiency of a Cartesian grid method and the flexibility of a gridless method for the complex geometries. The developed method is used to compute a number of test cases to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the method. The numerical results obtained indicate that the use of this hybrid method leads to a significant improvement in performance over its unstructured grid counterpart for the time‐accurate solution of the compressible Euler equations. An overall speed‐up factor from six to more than one order of magnitude and a saving in storage requirements up to one order of magnitude for all test cases in comparison with the unstructured grid method are demonstrated

A hybrid Cartesian grid and gridless method for compressible flows

A hybrid Cartesian grid and gridless method is presented to compute unsteady compressible flows for complex geometries. In this method, a Cartesian grid is used as baseline mesh to cover the computational domain, while the boundary surfaces are addressed using a gridless method. This hybrid method combines the efficiency of a Cartesian grid method and the flexibility of a gridless method for the complex geometries. The developed method is used to compute a number of test cases to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the method. The numerical results obtained indicate that the use of this hybrid method leads to a significant improvement in performance over its unstructured grid counterpart for the time-accurate solution of the compressible Euler equations. An overall speed-up factor of about eight and a saving in storage requirements about one order of magnitude for a typical three-dimensional problem in comparison with the unstructured grid method are demonstrated

An accurate, fast, matrix-free implicit method for computing unsteady flows on unstructured grids

An accurate, fast, matrix-free implicit method has been developed to solve the three-dimensional compressible unsteady flows on unstructured grids. A nonlinear system of equations as a result of a fully implicit temporal discretization is solved at each time step using a pseudo-time marching approach. A newly developed fast, matrix-free implicit method is then used to obtain the steady-state solution to the pseudo-time system. The developed method is applied to compute a variety of unsteady flow problems involving moving boundaries. The numerical results obtained indicate that the use of the present implicit method leads to a significant increase in performance over its explicit counterpart, while maintaining a similar memory requirement

Selective edge removal for unstructured grids with Cartesian cores

Several rules for redistributing geometric edge-coefficient obtained for grids of linear elements derived from the subdivision of rectangles, cubes or prisms are presented. By redistributing the geometric edge-coefficient, no work is carried out on approximately half of all the edges of such grids. The redistribution rule for triangles obtained from rectangles is generalized to arbitrary situations in 3-D, and implemented in a typical 3-D edge-based flow solver. The results indicate that without degradation of accuracy, CPU requirements can be cut considerably for typical large-scale grids. This allows a seamless integration of unstructured grids near boundaries with efficient Cartesian grids in the core regions of the domain

A Hermite WENO-based limiter for discontinuous Galerkin method on unstructured grids

A weighted essentially non-oscillatory reconstruction scheme based on Hermite polynomials is developed and applied as a limiter for the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method on unstructured grids. The solution polynomials are reconstructed using a WENO scheme by taking advantage of handily available and yet valuable information, namely the derivatives, in the context of the discontinuous Galerkin method. The stencils used in the reconstruction involve only the van Neumann neighborhood and are compact and consistent with the DG method. The developed HWENO limiter is implemented and used in a discontinuous Galerkin method to compute a variety of both steady-state and time-accurate compressible flow problems on unstructured grids. Numerical experiments for a wide range of flow conditions in both 2D and 3D configurations are presented to demonstrate the accuracy, effectiveness, and robustness of the designed HWENO limiter for the DG methods