Method of Fundamental Solutions for Three-Dimensional Exterior Potential Flows
Publication: Journal of Engineering Mechanics
Volume 142, Issue 11
Abstract
The method of fundamental solutions for solving three-dimensional potential flow problems with an unbounded domain is developed in this paper. Because the present meshless method is free from treatments of singularities, meshes, and numerical integrations, the computational effort and memory storage required are minimal as compared with other numerical schemes. It is a suitable technique for the potential flow problems in an unbounded domain, because it only requires that the field points be located on the body surface to satisfy the impermeable boundary condition without defining an optimal finite-domain computation. For the flow passing an obstacle, the impermeable boundary condition on the body surface can be dealt with by the linear superposition scheme. With the validations for the uniform flow passing a two-dimensional wing section and some three-dimensional benchmark problems, an application of case study for the flow field in the multiconnected unbounded domain is carried out. From the computational point of view, the present numerical procedure based on the method of fundamental solutions is efficient and simple to implement for multidimensional exterior potential problems when compared with the mesh-dependent schemes. Those mesh-dependent methods require a complex mesh generation procedure and confinement to a bounded computational domain for a multiconnected exterior problem.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank CoreTech System Co., for providing the license to Moldex3D Designer software. They also acknowledge Professor C. M. Fan at National Taiwan Ocean University for the helpful guidance on the contents, and research student C. H. Lin, who implemented some geometry in this paper.
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Published In
Journal of Engineering Mechanics
Volume 142 • Issue 11 • November 2016
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 2, 2015
Accepted: May 18, 2016
Published online: Jul 18, 2016
Published in print: Nov 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Dec 18, 2016
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