Method of Fundamental Solutions for Three-Dimensional Exterior Potential Flows

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-2016

Department

Mathematics

Abstract

The method of fundamental solutions for solving three-dimensional potential flow problems with an unbounded domain is developed in this paper. Because the present meshless method is free from treatments of singularities, meshes, and numerical integrations, the computational effort and memory storage required are minimal as compared with other numerical schemes. It is a suitable technique for the potential flow problems in an unbounded domain, because it only requires that the field points be located on the body surface to satisfy the impermeable boundary condition without defining an optimal finite-domain computation. For the flow passing an obstacle, the impermeable boundary condition on the body surface can be dealt with by the linear superposition scheme. With the validations for the uniform flow passing a two-dimensional wing section and some three-dimensional benchmark problems, an application of case study for the flow field in the multiconnected unbounded domain is carried out. From the computational point of view, the present numerical procedure based on the method of fundamental solutions is efficient and simple to implement for multidimensional exterior potential problems when compared with the mesh-dependent schemes. Those mesh-dependent methods require a complex mesh generation procedure and confinement to a bounded computational domain for a multiconnected exterior problem. (C) 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Publication Title

Journal of Engineering Mechanics

Volume

142

Issue

11

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