Modeling and Simulation of Low Speed Wind over the Great Sphinx

In this paper, the low speed wind over the Great Sphinx is simulated in order to investigate the effects of the wind flow structure on the surface of the statue. The three-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are solved based on Chorin-type projection method and using finite difference approximations. The computational mesh of such large scale simulation problems contains several millions of points, therefore the MPI-based parallel solution of Navier-Stokes equations is addressed on distributed-memory parallel architecture. The distributed solution methodology of Navier-Stokes equations is optimized to get the best accuracy and performance. Then, this optimized methodology is used to simulate the low speed northwest wind over the Great Sphinx at Reynolds number of 1000. The wind flow structure over the statue is visualized and intensively studied.