Open Access

ARTICLE

An automated approach for solution based mesh adaptation to enhance numerical accuracy for a given number of grid cells Applied to steady flow on hexahedral grids

Peter Lucas¹, Alexander H. van Zuijlen¹, Hester Bijl¹

1 Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology, P.O. Box 5058, 2600 GB Delft, The Netherlands

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2009, 41(2), 147-176. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmes.2009.041.147

Abstract

Mesh adaptation is a fairly established tool to obtain numerically accurate solutions for flow problems. Computational efficiency is, however, not always guaranteed for the adaptation strategies found in literature. Typically excessive mesh growth diminishes the potential efficiency gain. This paper, therefore, extends the strategy proposed by [Aftosmis and Berger (2002)] to compute the refinement threshold. The extended strategy computes the refinement threshold based on a user desired number of grid cells and adaptations, thereby ensuring high computational efficiency. Because our main interest is flow around wind turbines, the adaptation strategy has been optimized for flow around wind turbine airfoils. The proposed strategy was found to yield computationally efficient computations for flow around wind turbine airfoils as well as for other flow problems.

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Keywords

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