A vortex particle method for two-dimensional compressible flow

  • Authors:

  • Jeff D. Eldredge;Tim Colonius;Anthony Leonard

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Engineering, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK;Division of Engineering and Applied Science, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California;Division of Engineering and Applied Science, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computational Physics
  • Year:
  • 2002

Quantified Score

Hi-index 31.49

Visualization

Abstract

A vortex particle method is developed for simulating two-dimensional, unsteady compressible flow. The method uses the Helmholtz decomposition of the velocity field to separately treat the irrotational and solenoidal portions of the flow, and the particles are allowed to change volume to conserve mass. In addition to having vorticity and dilatation properties, the particles also carry density, enthalpy, and entropy. The resulting evolution equations contain terms that are computed with techniques used in some incompressible methods. Truncation of unbounded domains via a nonreflecting boundary condition is also considered. The fast multipole method is adapted to compressible particles in order to make the method computationally efficient. The new method is applied to several problems, including sound generation by corotating vortices and generation of vorticity by baroclinic torque.