Coupled Unsteady Fluid Dynamics and Aero-Acoustics Simulations of a Realistic Car Mirror: A Comparison of Cloud and High Performance Computing

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is already an established tool in the development of industrial devices, e.g. in the aircraft, automobile or rotating machinery industry (Pritz et al., A new sliding interface method for fluid machinery calculation. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Transport Phenomena and Dynamics of Rotating Machinery (ISROMAC14), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, 2012). In order to design the next generation of devices, highly reliable simulations are required. Continuously tightening regulations, such as restrictions on noise emission levels, increase the demand of simulation methods combining several physical aspects, such as fluid flow and noise. The investigation of flow induced noise is still a demanding task. The quality depends on the appropriate resolution of the noise sources in a flow. For a proper resolution generally the unsteady Navier-Stokes equations in compressible or incompressible form need to be solved. The introduction of simplifications such as steadiness of the flow and dimension reduction frequently lead to the elimination of noise sources. The authors aim to investigate flow induced noise generation and propagation for industrial purposes. The authors use a compressible CFD software originally developed at the Institute of Fluid Machinery (Fachgebiet Strömungmaschinen: http://www.fsm.kit.edu ) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Karlsruher Institut für Technologie: http://www.kit.edu ) (KIT) (Magagnato, Task Q Sci Bull Acad Comput Cent Gdansk 2(2):215–270, 1998), which has recently been adapted to the Nuberisim Cloud platform (Falquez, Pantle und Pritz GbR: Nuberisim. http://www.nuberisim.de/ . Cited 31 May 2015). The main study case of this paper is a generic automobile mirror for exploring aero-acoustic predictions. To perform such simulations and to investigate the capability of the Cloud platform for this type of simulations, different architectures are investigated: a conventional PC as well as Cloud and High Performance Computing (HPC) instances. For a better overview, additionally a simpler and overall faster CFD-only study case is introduced.