Philip Paul Beauchamp

Viscous Flow Analysis Using the Poincaré Decomposition

A computational technique for the analysis of two-dimensional viscous fluid flow fields is presented. The technique is based on an exact formulation of the viscous flow problem using the Poincare decomposition for the velocity field. The numerical method developed is a hybrid technique which employs the boundary integral method to determine the velocity field while the vorticity evolution is determined from a finite-difference technique. The technique has been applied to the transient and steady-state analysis of thin airfoils in arbitrary motion. Comparison with known results have been found to be in good agreement using computational grids that would defeat most other viscous solvers.