Carl Ollivier-Gooch

Professor and Associate Head of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Indigeneity & Engagement

B.A. Russian, B.S.M.E. (Rice); M.S., Ph.D. (Stanford); Member ASME, Senior Member AIAA, Member Canadian CFD Society

Research Interests

Algorithm development for computational aerodynamics.

Current Projects

Developing high-order accurate methods for compressible, turbulent flows, with applications in aerodynamics and aerodynamic optimization. Anisotropic unstructured mesh adaptation and generation in parallel. Developing methods to assess and control numerical error in CFD simulations.

Current Research Work

• Computational Aerodynamics: Dr. Ollivier-Gooch’s research group specializes in developing techniques for numerical solution of problems in aerodynamic. In particular, we are working to take advantage of both the geometric flexibility of unstructured mesh methods and the accuracy benefits of high-order methods. Recent work has exploited Newton-GMRES techniques to develop extremely efficient, high-order accurate methods for inviscid compressible aerodynamics problems, including showing that high-order methods can achieve solutions of engineering accuracy more quickly than second-order methods. Current work is focused on extending these results to turbulent viscous flows and on developing high-order accurate optimization techniques.
• Unstructured Mesh Generation: Hand-in-hand with research in unstructured mesh flow solvers, Dr. Ollivier-Goochs group also studies unstructured mesh generation, which is the process of decomposing a domain into triangular or tetrahedral cells. Past work has included development of highly successful techniques for unstructured mesh improvement; and extension of meshing techniques with known mesh quality guarantees to allow better control of cell size in both two and three dimensions and to work with curved boundary data in two and three dimensions. Ongoing work includes generation and refinement of anisotropic meshes (especially for high Reynolds number viscous flows). Dr. Ollivier-Gooch and his group have written and maintain a software library for unstructured mesh generation. This software has been freely available for non-profit use on the WWW since January 1998, and is now in its tenth version. The software has been downloaded by over 6000 users in 62 countries. Applications vary from fluid and solid mechanics to cancer research and microbiology to simulation of star and planet formation.
• Error Assessment and Control for Unstructured Mesh Methods: The ultimate goal of CFD simulations is to provide an answer that is not just acurate, but which has known error bounds.  Assessment of error in output quantities like lift and drag is well established for finite element methods, but these methods are less commonly used for finite volume methods, perhaps because of the poor behavior of some measures of error.  Dr. Ollivier-Gooch’s group is working to improve understanding of error for unstructured mesh finite volume methods and to exploit that understanding to provide good error bounds on output quantities. At the same time, we are working to identify mesh features that are particularly harmful for accuracy and use that knowledge to generate better meshes.
• Stability and Convergence for Unstructured-Mesh Finite-Volume Methods: Fairly often, an aerodynamics simulation doesn’t converge properly to steady-state, even though the physical flow should be steady. Sometimes, this takes the form of the solution “blowing up” — growing without bounds in ways that are clearly unphysical.  Other times, the solution does eventually reach steady state, but does this very slowly. Dr. Ollivier-Gooch’s research group is working to address both of these problems, using a combination of modal analysis, machine learning, and mesh improvement techniques.

Selected Publications

• E. Mirzaee and C. Ollivier-Gooch. A Newton’s solver for high-order wall distance computation on three-dimensional curved, unstructured meshes. Computers and Fluids, v 301, August, 2025. doi:10.1016/j.compfluid.2025.106765
• A. Jayasankar and C. Ollivier-Gooch. Adjoint Error Correction on Unstructured Finite Volume Solvers. ASME Journal of Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification, February 2025. doi:10.1115/F1.4067686
• A. Jayasankar and C. Ollivier-Gooch. On Order Elevation for Unstructured Finite Volume Solvers using Defect Correction. ASME Journal of Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification, February 2025. doi:10.1115/F1.4067686
• M. Zandsalimy and C. Ollivier-Gooch. CFD Stability Improvement Using Dynamic Mode Decomposition of Solution Update Vectors. Journal of Computational Physics, v 513, September 2024. doi:10.1016/j.jcp.2024.113195
• M. Zandsalimy and C. Ollivier-Gooch. Residual Vector And Solution Mode Analysis Using Semi-Supervised Machine Learning For Mesh Modification And CFD Stability Improvement. Journal of Computational Physics, v 510, August 2024. doi:10.1016/j.jcp.2024.113063
• C. Ollivier-Gooch and J. G. Coder. Fourth AIAA High-Lift Prediction Workshop: Fixed-Grid Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes Summary. Journal of Aircraft, 2023. doi:10.2514/1.C037184
• M. Zandsalimy and C. Ollivier-Gooch. A Novel Approach to Mesh Optimization to Stabilize Unstructured Finite Volume Simulations. Journal of Computational Physics, v 453, March, 2022. doi:10.1016/j.jcp.2022.110959
• Z. Xiao, C. Ollivier-Gooch and J. D. Zuniga-Vazquez. Anisotropic tetrahedral mesh adaptation with improved metric alignment and orthogonality. Computer Aided Design, v 143, February, 2022. doi:10.1016/j.cad.2021.103136

For a full list of publications, visit my profile on: