Numerical simulation of supersonic wake flow with parallel computers

Simulating a supersonic wake flow field behind a conical body is a computing intensive task. It requires a large number of computational cells to capture the dominant flow physics and a robust numerical algorithm to obtain a reliable solution. High performance parallel computers with unique distributed processing and data storage capability can provide this need. They have larger computational memory and faster computing time than conventional vector computers. We apply the PINCA Navier-Stokes code to simulate a wind-tunnel supersonic wake experiment on Intel Gamma, Intel Paragon, and IBM SP2 parallel computers. These simulations are performed to study the mean flow in the near wake region of a sharp, 7-degree half-angle, adiabatic cone at Mach number 4.3 and freestream Reynolds number of 40,600. Overall the numerical solutions capture the general features of the hypersonic laminar wake flow and compare favorably with the wind tunnel data. With a refined and clustering grid distribution in the recirculation zone, the calculated location of the rear stagnation point is consistent with the 2D axisymmetric and 3D experiments. In this study, we also demonstrate the importance of having a large local memory capacity within a computer node and the effective utilization of the number of computer nodes to achieve good parallel performance when simulating a complex, large-scale wake flow problem