High-order accurate methods for computational fluid dynamics

Development of Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) discontinuous Galerkin solver for the computation of two and three-dimensional compressible/incompressible flows with a k-ω turbulence model. The code can exploit distributed memory parallel computers (through PETSc and MPI) and has been used to compute high-order accurate solutions of complex 3D turbulent flows. Recent activity has been devoted to improve the efficiency of this class of methods by adopting appropriate shape functions and quadrature points (spectral discontinuous Galerkin method) and a p-multigrid strategy to accelerate the convergence for steady state computations. Part of this work has been developed in the framework of two EU projects: ADIGMA (2006-2009) and IDIHOM (2010-2013). In the last years the code has been extended to the incompressible flows. Part of this work has been developed in the framework of the PRIN2009 project, whose objective is the simulation of the turbulent flow through a vertical axis wind turbine.