GALCIT Colloquium

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been an important tool in aircraft design since the 1970s. Current design technologies use low-fidelity models of the turbulent airflow around aircraft and under limited flight conditions. Removing these limitations requires high-fidelity modeling of turbulence, such as Large Eddy Simulations (LES) or hybrid RANS-LES.

Many of these high fidelity simulations exhibit chaotic dynamics. To efficiently design and optimization aircraft using these chaotic simulations, we need to perform sensitivity analysis to these simulations. This talk introduces a new algorithm for performing such sensitivity analysis of chaotic simulations. The algorithm, based on the Least Squares Shadowing formulation, finds a non-diverging solution of the linearized governing equation. We will share the recent experience of applying this algorithm to several flow simulations. The algorithm can not only be used in design optimization using chaotic simulations, but also error estimation, adaptive meshing, and uncertainty quantification of chaotic flow simulations.