Spreadsheet Fluid Dynamics of a Blunt Body Problem

Abstract

A supersonic blunt body problem was solved by the Euler equation, by using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets have an iteration function, and a finite difference Euler equation can be solved by flux vector splitting and the explicit time marching procedure. The cells in a spreadsheet are used as grids in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). We created computational space on spreadsheets based on standard CFD procedures. We first solved a blunt body problem, i. e., the flow around a sphere, with a prescribed approximate hyperbolic shock. This was an engineering approach and the result was satisfactory and comparable to that of the experiment. We used a coarse grid system and the shock fitting technique was subsequently employed by using the time-dependent cells. The asymptotic shock waveform was almost identical to the real one. The physical quantities of the flow were compared to the experimental results.