Section: Research Program

Computational fluid mechanics: numerical methods

All the methods we describe are mesh-based methods: the computational domain is divided into cells, that have an elementary shape: triangle and quadrangle in two dimensions, and tetrahedra, hexahedra, pyramids, and prism in three dimensions. If the cells are only regular hexahedra, the mesh is said to be structured. Otherwise, it is said to be unstructured. If the mesh is composed of more than one sort of elementary shape, the mesh is said to be hybrid.

The basic numerical model for the computation of internal flows is based on the Navier-Stokes equations. For fifty years, many sorts of numerical approximation have been tried for this sort of system: finite differences, finite volumes, and finite elements.

The finite differences have met a great success for some equations, but for the approximation of fluid mechanics, they suffer from two drawbacks. First, structured meshes must be used. This drawback can be very limiting in the context of internal aerodynamics, in which the geometries can be very complex. The other problem is that finite difference schemes do not include any upwinding process, which is essential for convection dominated flows.

The finite volumes methods have imposed themselves in the last thirty years in the context of aerodynamic. They intrinsically contain an upwinding mechanism, so that they are naturally stable for linear as much as for nonlinear convective flows. The extension to diffusive flows has been done in [18] . Whereas the extension to second order with the MUSCL method is widely spread, the extension to higher order has always been a strong drawback of finite volumes methods. For such an extension, reconstruction methods have been developed (ENO, WENO). Nevertheless, these methods need to use a stencil that increases quickly with the order, which induces problems for the parallelisation and the efficiency of the implementation. Another natural extension of finite volume methods are the so-called discontinuous Galerkin methods. These methods are based on the Galerkin' idea of projecting the weak formulation of the equations on a finite dimensional space. But on the contrary to the conforming finite elements method, the approximation space is composed of functions that are continuous (typically: polynomials) inside each cell, but that are discontinuous on the sides. The discontinuous Galerkin methods are currently very popular, because they can be used with many sort of partial differential equations. Moreover, the fact that the approximation is discontinuous allows to use modern mesh adaptation (hanging nodes, which appear in non conforming mesh adaptation), and adaptive order, in which the high order is used only where the solution is smooth.

Discontinuous Galerkin methods where introduced by Reed and Hill [39] and first studied by Lesaint and Raviart [32] . The extension to the Euler system with explicit time integration was mainly led by Shu, Cockburn and their collaborators. The steps of time integration and slope limiting were similar to high order ENO schemes, whereas specific constraints given by the finite elements nature of the scheme were progressively solved, for scalar conservation laws [22] , [21] , one dimensional systems [20] , multidimensional scalar conservation laws [19] , and multidimensional systems [23] . For the same system, we can also cite the work of [25] , [30] , which is slightly different: the stabilisation is made by adding a nonlinear stabilisation term, and the time integration is implicit. Then, the extension to the compressible Navier-Stokes system was made by Bassi and Rebay [17] , first by a mixed type finite element method, and then simplified by means of lifting operators. The extension to the $k-\omega$ RANS system was made in [16] . Another type of discontinuous Galerkin method for Navier Stokes is the so-called Symmetric Interior Penalty (SIP) method. It is used for example by Hartmann and Houston [28] . The symmetric nature of the discretization is particularly well suited with mesh adaptation by means of the adjoint equation resolution [29] . Last, we note that the discontinuous Galerkin method was already successfully tested in [24] at Direct Numerical Simulation scale for very moderate Reynolds, and also by the Munz's team in Stuttgart [33] , with local time stepping.

For concluding this section, there already exist numerical schemes based on the discontinuous Galerkin method which proved to be efficient for computing compressible viscous flows. Nevertheless, there remain things to be improved, which include: efficient shock capturing term methods for supersonic flows, high order discretization of curved boundaries, or low Mach behaviour of these schemes. Another drawback of the discontinuous Galerkin methods is that they are very computationally costly, due to the accurate representation of the solution. Accordingly, a particular care must be taken on the implementation for being efficient.