Abstract:
CFD methods encounter bottlenecks such as high computational costs and lengthy simulation time when applied to the numerical simulation of large-scale complex flows. Recently, quantum computing has emerged as a novel solution in the field of aerospace CFD. By harnessing the superposition and entanglement properties of qubits, quantum computing theoretically offers logarithmic storage reduction and exponential efficiency acceleration as compared with classical computers, holding immense potential in tackling tasks of large-scale aerodynamic simulations. This work focused on exploring the application of quantum computing techniques in the field of aerospace CFD. For high-speed steady flows, this work adopted a variational quantum linear solver (VQLS) to assist in solving the high-dimensional linear system produced by the temporal discretization of CFD. Consequently, a VQLS-CFD hybrid method, implementable on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, was developed. Through numerical simulations of supersonic flows over the double-ellipsoid and the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) models, the VQLS-CFD hybrid method was validated to achieve robust and accurate simulations of large-scale complex flows, producing high-quality computational results. However, the quantum computational fluid dynamics (QCFD) method presented in this work has not yet achieved a strict sense of acceleration in terms of computational efficiency. The breakthrough of this phenomenon depends on the continuous development of quantum computer hardware as well as the ongoing optimization and maturity of QCFD algorithms.