Assessment of Discretization Uncertainty Estimators Based On Grid Refinement Studies
Abstract This paper presents the assessment of the performance of 9 discretization uncertainty estimates based on grid refinement studies including methods that use grid triplets and others that use a largest number of data points, which in the present study was set to five. The uncertainty estimates are performed for the data set proposed for the 2017 ASME Workshop on Estimation of Discretization Errors including functional and local flow quantities from the two-dimensional incompressible flows over a flat plate and the NACA 0012 airfoil. The data were generated with a RANS solver using three eddy-viscosity turbulence models with double precision and sufficiently tight iterative convergence criteria to ensure that the numerical error is dominated by the discretization error. The use of several geometrically similar grid sets with different near-wall cell sizes lead to a wide range of convergence properties for the selected flow quantities. The evaluation of uncertainty estimates is based on the ratio of the estimated uncertainty over the "exact error" that is obtained from an "exact solution" obtained from extra grid sets significantly more refined than those used to generate the Workshop data. Although none of the methods tested fulfilled the goal of bounding the "exact error" 95 times out of 100 that was tested, the results suggest that the methods tested are useful tools for the assessment of the numerical uncertainty of practical numerical simulations even for cases where it is not possible to generate data in the "asymptotic range".