Viscous-inviscid interaction and local grid refinement via truncation error injection

A methodology is presented which makes it possible to decouple a complex problem having multiple disparate length scales into problems of single length scale so that they can be solved more efficiently on a computer. The method is applied to a viscous transonic flow over an airfoil. It is found that accurate prediction of the flow over an airfoil can be obtained by solving the Euler equations on a relatively coarse global grid with viscous effects computed separately on a boundary-layer type grid and injected into the global grid solution as a combination of vorticity and trucation error.