In 2024, Metacomp participated in the High-Fidelity CFD Workshop in the shock-dominated flows category. The scope of the workshop was to provide an open forum for evaluating the status of CFD methods in solving a wide range of flow problems and to assess the performance of CFD methods through comparison to production CFD codes widely used in the aerospace industry with well-defined metrics. The two test cases performed included the HIFiRE-1 hypersonic vehicle and the Sajben transonic diffuser. Compressible RANS simulations were performed with the one-equation SA turbulence model. CFD++ normally includes a default compressibility correction in the SA model, but that was disabled for these workshop simulations in order to allow direct comparisons with other SA model code implementations. In all simulations, air was treated as a calorically perfect gas and Sutherland’s law was used to determine the viscosity and thermal conductivity.
For the HIFiRE-1 case, a series of workshop provided structured grids were used. Figure 1 shows the HIFiRE-1 vehicle which was simulated at Mach 7.18 and an angle-of-attack of 2˚. Code-to-code comparisons of pressure and heat flux in the separated zone region on the finest grid level show very good agreement between codes, see Figure 2.
For the Sajben transonic diffuser, a series of structured meshes were generated by Metacomp using Fidelity Pointwise software. This test case featured fully turbulent flow with a normal shock, and shock-induced flow separation, with an inlet total pressure of 1.35 bar and inlet total temperature of 277˚K. This case was originally described by Bogar et al. and has been incorporated into the NPARC Alliance archive of validation cases and has been utilized to validate other codes in the past. Figure 3 shows an overall view of the Mach contours and a zoomed-in view at the curved shock. Code-to-code comparison of wall static pressure profiles is shown in Figure 4, showing excellent agreement between all codes and experimental data.
Legend: Black (Sandia National Labs) , Red (GIST) and Pink (Metacomp).
