Parallel preconditioned WENO scheme for three-dimensional flow simulation of NREL Phase VI Rotor

The preconditioned weighted essentially non-oscillatory (P-WENO) solver for viscous flows (Huang et al. (2009) [9]) is extended to non-inertial reference frames. In the present scheme, patched multi-block grid system is employed and parallel computing is adopted as well. With the present parallel P-WENO solver, three-dimensional flows of the Phase VI Rotor from National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) can be simulated and analyzed for different wind speeds. Our simulation results show good agreement with the numerical predictions based on incompressible Navier–Stokes (N–S) equations as well as the available wind tunnel data from NREL. The flow phenomena, including separation and attachment line, can be captured by the present scheme. The parallel strategy adopted is a block-domain decomposition method for the patched multi-block grid system. To balance the load among different computing nodes, a Tabu search algorithm is adopted for the parallelization. The parallel efficiency of the parallel P-WENO scheme is examined for node numbers ranging from 1 to 64. It is found that the parallel efficiency is monotonically decreased as the node number adopted is increased; the parallel efficiency is retained over 90% for all cases of different node numbers. Due to the high parallel efficiency, our parallel P-WENO solver is validated for applying to practical fluid problems from compressible to incompressible limits.