Tetrahedral and hexahedral mesh adaptation for CFD problems (Q1379043)

The authors present two methods for the dynamic adaptation of three-dimensional unstructured meshes for problems in computational fluid dynamics. Both the tetrahedral and the hexahedral procedures use edge-based data structures to allow anisotropic refinement and coarsening. Hexahedral meshes have the advantage that they can be repeatedly subdivided anisotropically without deteriorating the element quality. However, to eliminate hanging vertices in the mesh, pyramids, prisms, and tetrahedra are used as buffer elements to interface the regions of refined and unrefined hexahedra. A problem with excessive propagation of the refinement region for hexahedral meshes is eliminated not by upgrading element edge-marking patterns, but by inserting a vertex at the centre of the hexahedron instead. The hexahedron is then locally split to generate a valid mesh. A comparison of the computer resources that are required for both types of grids shows that hexahedral meshes have half the storage requirements and run almost twice as fast as tetrahedral meshes having the same distribution of vertices. The solution-adaptive schemes are demonstrated for two simple CFD cases. Computed solutions for Euler equations for a pseudo-three-dimensional problem show good agreement with results from a conventional structured-grid method. Results are also presented for realistic test case in helicopter acoustics that show that these methods can be applied efficiently to large CFD-problems. These results also indicate that hexahedral meshes utilize computer resources more efficiently than tetrahedral meshes for the same level of solution accuracy.