An Implicit-explicit Flow Solver for Complex Unsteady Flows a Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Aeronautical Astronautical Engineering and the Committee on Graduate Studies of Stanford University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Current calculations of complex unsteady flows are prohibitively expensive for use in real engineering applications. Typical flow solvers for unsteady integration employ a fully implicit time stepping scheme, in which the equations are solved by an inner iteration. In order to achieve convergence within each physical time step, a substantial number of pseudo-time steps (typically between 30-100, depending on the case) are required. Another unfavorable characteristic of the dual time stepping method is that there are no available error estimates for time accuracy available unless the inner iterations are fully converged, although numerical experiments have demonstrated second order accuracy in time. The approach in this thesis is to construct hybrid type schemes by combining implicit and explicit schemes in a manner that guarantees second order accuracy in time. An initial time accurate ADI step is introduced, followed by a small number of cycles of the dual-time stepping scheme augmented by multigrid. The formal second order accuracy in time should be retained without the need for large numbers of inner iterations. The number of inner iterations required for convergence can thus be reduced while maintaining the same overall error levels. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, several pitching airfoil test cases were examined, offering a close look at possible reductions in computational cost by adopting the present approach.