Level sets for CFD in aerospace engineering

In the past two decades, the level set concept has been extensively explored. The superiority of the differential level set to other more ad hoc methods as a formal framework for directly/indirectly solving ‘front-propagation’ natured problems is now fully established. Nowadays, in many areas of aerospace related computational fluid dynamics, applications of level set methods can be found. This paper gives a brief review of these applications and how level sets can be useful in tackling challenging computational aerospace problems. The use of level sets in premixed turbulent combustion, aero-acoustics, geometry definition/morphing, meshing and turbulence modeling is explored in detail and other applications discussed.