22nd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Harrogate, UK, 28 August - 1st September, 2000
Paper ICAS 2000-2.4.4

A SOLUTION ADAPTIVE TECHNIQUE USING TETRAHEDRAL UNSTRUCTURED GRIDS

S. Z. Pirzadeh
NASA Langley Research Center, USA

Keywords: unstructured grids, grid adaptation, remeshing

An adaptive unstructured grid refinement technique has been developed and successfully applied to several three dimensional inviscid flow test cases. The method is based on a combination of surface mesh subdivision and local remeshing of the volume grid. Simple functions of flow quantities are employed to detect dominant features of the flowfield. The method is designed for modular coupling with various error/feature analyzers and flow solvers. Several steady-state, inviscid flow test cases are presented to demonstrate the applicability of the method for solving practical three-dimensional problems. In all cases, accurate solutions featuring complex, nonlinear flow phenomena such as shock waves and vortices have been generated automatically and efficiently.

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