A Scalable Numerical Method for Simulating Flows Around High-Speed Train Under Crosswind Conditions

Abstract

This paper presents a parallel Newton-Krylov-Schwarz method for the numerical simulation of unsteady flows at high Reynolds number around a high-speed train under crosswind. With a realistic train geometry, a realistic Reynolds number, and a realistic wind speed, this is a very challenging computational problem. Because of the limited parallel scalability, commercial CFD software is not suitable for supercomputers with a large number of processors. We develop a Newton-Krylov-Schwarz based fully implicit method, and the corresponding parallel software, for the 3D unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations discretized with a stabilized finite element method on very fine unstructured meshes. We test the algorithm and software for flows passing a train modeled after China's high-speed train CRH380B, and we also compare our results with results obtained from commercial CFD software. Our algorithm shows very good parallel scalability on a supercomputer with over one thousand processors.