Unstructured Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation for Comprenssible Flows Using Refinement and Coarsening Procedures

Abstract

An anisotropic mesh adaptation procedure for unstructured meshes and its coupling with a compressible flow simulation code with large Mach range using the Finite Element Method (Bubnov-Galerkin) is presented in this work. The Characteristic Based Split method (CBS) is used for the compressible flow simulation, using linear triangular and linear tetrahedral finite elements for two and three dimensional cases, respectively. An anisotropic mesh adaptation technique which uses a tensor error estimation based on a Riemann metric, including mesh refinement and mesh coarsening procedures is implemented for accurate and computationally cheaper solutions evaluation. Anisotropic meshes are obtained without any mesh moving technique. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional analyses are performed in order to validate the proposed methodology and additional large and complex tests are also included.