NUMERICAL-METHOD FOR COUPLED FLUID-FLOW, HEAT-TRANSFER AND STRESS-ANALYSIS USING UNSTRUCTURED MOVING MESHES WITH CELLS OF ARBITRARY TOPOLOGY

A numerical method is presented that can be used for both solid body stress analysis and fluid flow predictions, independently as well as in a coupled manner. The method uses an integral form of equations governing mass, energy and momentum balance for an arbitrary control volume. A detailed description is provided of a novel second-order accurate spatial discretisation technique which can accommodate unstructured moving meshes with cells of arbitrary topology. This is accompanied by a fully implicit temporal discretisation, which makes the method stable for any time step size. The resulting set of coupled non-linear algebraic equations is solved by employing a segregated approach, leading to a decoupled set of linear algebraic equations for each dependent variable, with a sparse diagonally dominant coefficient matrix. These equations are solved by an iterative conjugate gradient solver which retains the sparsity of the coefficient matrix, thus achieving a very efficient use of computer resources. The method has been tested on a number of fluid flow and stress analysis problems and numerical calculations show favourable agreement with analytical and/or experimental results. In order to demonstrate the full capabilities of the present method, an example of numerically complex coupled fluid flow, stress analysis and heat transfer calculations is presented.