A Multizone Time-Marching Technique for Unsteady Separating Three-Dimensional Boundary Layers and Its Application to the Symmetry-Plane Solution of an Impulsively Started Prolate Spheroid

Recent interest in unsteady separation and separated flows brings up the need of an accurate and efficient computational scheme for general unsteady three-dimensional boundary-layer flows. Resolution of the singular behavior at separation is a delicate problem. The task is further complicated by the geometrical singularity and the nonstationary stagnation point. The present paper proposes a numerical scheme to sidestep these difficulties. At the first stage of development, the simpler problem of the symmetry-plane solution of the laminar boundary-layer over an impulsively-started prolate spheroid is calculated. Results show that the present Eulerian calculation satisfactorily captures the singular behavior of the boundary layer when separation is approached. Comparison with Xu and Wang’s recent results and those for the two-dimensional elliptic cylinder calculated by the Lagrangian method are also made. Discussions of the results for unsteady separation at zero, small and large incidences are presented.