Assessment of the Academic CFD Code “Galatea” Using the NASA Common Research Model (CRM)

CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) algorithms are nowadays a necessary tool in the aerospace science, as their application allows for the prediction of the aerodynamic characteristics of complete aircraft configurations in a relatively short period of time. A brief presentation and evaluation of such a recently developed academic code, named Galatea, is the main goal of this study. Galatea employs the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations, discretized with a node-centered finite-volume scheme on three-dimensional unstructured hybrid grids for the simulation of inviscid and viscous compressible fluid flows. For the turbulence prediction appropriate turbulence models (k-ε, k-ω and SST) have been incorporated, while for the acceleration of the solution an agglomeration multigrid scheme along with a suitable parallelization strategy are employed. For the assessment of this algorithm runs over the wing-body and the wing-body-horizontal tail NASA Common Research Model (CRM) configurations were performed, allowing for a comparison in terms of accuracy of the obtained results with the experimental wind tunnel data, as well as with the computational results of corresponding reference solvers.