Unstructured Mesh Techniques in Computational Fluid Dynamics

Presented by:

Dimitri J. Mavriplis
Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Wyoming

May 28, 2004 – 10:30 am – Chapman Room, Mesa Laboratory

Abstract:

The use of unstructured meshes for computational fluid dynamics problems has become more widespread over the last decade, due to the added flexibility these meshes provide for discretizing complex geometries and their suitability for adaptive meshing implementations. On the other hand, unstructured mesh discretizations lead to large sparse matrices which poses additional challenges for the development of efficient solution techniques. This talk will discuss various techniques developed by the author for fluid dynamics simulations based on unstructured meshes. An agglomeration multigrid solver will be described which automatically creates coarse multigrid levels for accelerating steady-state and implicit time-integration problems.

Three dimensional adaptive meshing techniques using element subdivision on hybrid mixed element meshes will also be described. The development of an efficient and robust mesh deformation technique for coupled fluid-structural problems will be described, with an emphasis on higher-order time discretization. Finally, on-going work on the development of efficient solution techniques for higher-order methods such as 4th order Discontinuous Galerkin discretizations will be discussed.