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Evaluation of adaptive mesh refinement and coarsening for the computation of compressible flows on unstructured meshes
Author(s) -
Walter Miguel A. T.,
Abdu Aline A. Q.,
Figueira da Silva Luís Fernando,
Azevedo João Luiz F.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
international journal for numerical methods in fluids
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.938
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1097-0363
pISSN - 0271-2091
DOI - 10.1002/fld.1037
Subject(s) - adaptive mesh refinement , polygon mesh , computation , computer science , finite volume method , reduction (mathematics) , shock (circulatory) , compressibility , compressible flow , shock wave , computational science , computational fluid dynamics , flow (mathematics) , algorithm , upwind scheme , mesh generation , mechanics , mathematics , geometry , physics , finite element method , mathematical analysis , computer graphics (images) , medicine , thermodynamics , discretization
Abstract The compressible gas flows of interest to aerospace applications often involve situations where shock and expansion waves are present. Decreasing the characteristic dimension of the computational cells in the vicinity of shock waves improves the quality of the computed flows. This reduction in size may be accomplished by the use of mesh adaption procedures. In this paper an analysis is presented of an adaptive mesh scheme developed for an unstructured mesh finite volume upwind computer code. This scheme is tailored to refine or coarsen the computational mesh where gradients of the flow properties are respectively high or low. The refinement and coarsening procedures are applied to the classical gas dynamic problems of the stabilization of shock waves by solid bodies. In particular, situations where oblique shock waves interact with an expansion fan and where bow shocks arise around solid bodies are considered. The effectiveness of the scheme in reducing the computational time, while increasing the solution accuracy, is assessed. It is shown that the refinement procedure alone leads to a number of computational cells which is 20% larger than when alternate passes of refinement and coarsening are used. Accordingly, a reduction of computational time of the same order of magnitude is obtained. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.