Towards the virtual wind tunnel

The maturity of numerical techniques both in Computational Structural and Fluid Dynamics, accompanied by the availability of affordable high-performance hardware, allows the use of virtual rapid-prototyping facilities as realistic alternatives to traditional wind tunnel experiments. This work aims to present a virtual wind tunnel tool that combines both “standard” body-fitted approaches and innovative embedded techniques. Two are the distinctive features of the work. Firstly, it allows the simulation of membrane structures subjected to large displacements. This is typically challenging both for embedded solvers, due to the need of modelling a strong discontinuity of the flow field in correspondence of the structural position, and for body-fitted techniques, due to the large displacement regime. Secondly, it allows combining body fitted and embedded structures within the same simulation. All the presented strategies are developed both in Open MP and MPI.