A 3D AGGLOMERATION MULTIGRID SOLVER FOR THE REYNOLDS–AVERAGED NAVIER–STOKES EQUATIONS ON UNSTRUCTURED MESHES

An agglomeration multigrid strategy is developed and implemented for the solution of three-dimensional steady viscous flows. The method enables convergence acceleration with minimal additional memory overhead and is completely automated in that it can deal with grids of arbitrary construction. The multigrid technique is validated by comparing the delivered convergence rates with those obtained by a previously developed overset-mesh multigrid approach and by demonstrating grid-independent convergence rates for aerodynamic problems on very large grids. Prospects for further increases in multigrid efficiency for high-Reynolds-number viscous flows on highly stretched meshes are discussed.