Co-investigators Mark Drela , Karen Willcox
Project Website http://acdl.mit.edu/projectx.html
The impact of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) on aerospace design is hindered by the lack of certainty in CFD simulations as they are typically performed today. The next generation of CFD must be capable of producing simulations at engineering-required accuracy in a reasonable time and in an automated manner. Project X is the ACDL's research initiative aimed at developing this next generation CFD capability. We believe that the critical ingredients for achieving a breakthrough in CFD include:
(*) Higher-order discretization(*) Solution based, hp-adaptivity(*) Direct interface to CAD
The Project X software is following a team-based development strategy. The purpose of this team-based strategy is to allow individual students or staff to focus on their particular research while benefiting from the contributions of others on the team. For example, while one student developed the basic p-multigrid algorithm for calculation of Euler flows, another student developed the Navier-Stokes discretization and simply used the p-multigrid framework. Our team-based development strategy has been heavily influenced by the work at NASA Langley of the FUN3D group. In particular, we archive the code using CVS and have a nightly build-and-test procedure to identify when a capability of the code is no longer functioning properly.