Thursday, June 21, 2012

A Very Successful Workshop

This blog is so overdue, since the Workshop concluded nearly six months ago! But better late than never. So here I am, giving you an much delayed update.


After several years of planning, the 1st International Workshop on High-Order CFD Methods was successfully held in Nashville, Tennessee, on January 7 and 8, 2012, just before the 50th Aerospace Sciences Meeting. Over 70 participants from all over the world across the research spectrum of academia, government labs and private industry attended the Workshop. Many interesting results were presented. The major findings from the Workshop include:

1.     For problems with smooth solutions and geometries, high-order methods are able to demonstrate high-order accuracy with h and p-refinement. High-order methods demonstrated better performance than the 2nd-order finite volume method for both steady and unsteady problems based on error vs. cost.

2.     For problems with non-smooth solutions or geometries, high-order methods cannot achieve high-order accuracy as expected. They are comparable to low order methods in performance.

3.     Solution based hp-adaptations have been shown to be very effective in minimizing the computational cost to achieve a given level of accuracy.

4.     For RANS simulations, high-order methods are still not as robust as low order methods in converging to the steady state solution. It is believed that this behavior is related to non-smoothness introduced in the turbulence models.

If you are interested in doing research on high order methods, the following pacing items may interest you:

1.     High-order mesh generation

2.     Solution based hp-adaptations

3.  Scalable, low memory efficient time integrators for RANS and hybrid RANS/LES approaches

4.     Robust, accuracy-preserving and parameter-free shock capturing

Some of the abstracts of the workshop are contained here:

The next workshop will be held in Cologne, Germany next summer. Check the workshop 
web site for updated information.

On a personal note, I will join University of Kansas as the Spahr Professor and Chair of Aerospace Engineering in August 2012. It was a difficult decision, but I do look forward to the new challenges ahead.