Vortex-dominated conical-flow computations using unstructured adaptively-refined meshes
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
SEARCH · Engineering Papers
Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
This viewgraph presentation covers the advantages of mesh adaptation, unstructured grids, and dynamic load balancing. It illustrates parallel adaptive communications, and explains PLUM (Parallel dynamic load balancing for adaptive unstructured meshes), and PSAW (Proper Self Avoiding Walks).
The objective of adaptive meshing and automatic error control in finite element analysis is to eliminate the need for the application engineer from re-meshing and re-running design simulations to verify numerical accuracy. The user should only need to enter the component geometry and a coarse finite element mesh. The software will then autonomously and adaptively refine this mesh where needed, reducing the error in the fields to a user prescribed value. The ideal end result of the simulation is a measurable quantity (e.g. scattered field, input impedance), calculated to a prescribed error, in less time and less machine memory than if the user applied typical uniform mesh refinement by hand. It would also allow for the simulation of larger objects since an optimal mesh is created.
Problems involving mesh motion-which should not be mistakenly associated with moving mesh methods, a class of adaptive mesh redistribution techniques-are of critical importance in numerical simulations of the thermal response of melting and ablative materials. Ablation is the process by which material vaporizes or otherwise erodes due to strong heating. Accurate modeling of such materials is of the utmost importance in design of passive thermal protection systems ("heatshields") for spacecraft, the layer of the vehicle that ensures survival of crew and craft during re-entry. In an explicit mesh motion approach, a complete thermal solve is first performed. Afterwards, the thermal response is used to determine surface recession rates. These values are then used to generate boundary conditions for an a posteriori correction designed to update the location of the mesh nodes. Most often, linear elastic or biharmonic equations are used to model this material response, traditionally in a finite element framework so that complex geometries can be simulated. A simple scheme for moving the boundary nodes involves receding along the surface normals. However, for all but the simplest problem geometries, evolution in time following such a scheme will eventually bring the mesh to intersect and "tangle" with itself, inducing failure. This presentation demonstrates a comprehensive and sophisticated scheme that analyzes the local geometry of each node with help from user-provided clues to eliminate the tangle and enable simulations on a wide-class of difficult problem geometries. The method developed is demonstrated for linear elastic equations but is general enough that it may be adapted to other modeling equations. The presentation will explicate the inner workings of the tangle-free mesh motion algorithm for both two and three-dimensional meshes. It will show abstract examples of the method's success, including a verification problem that demonstrates its accuracy and correctness. The focus of the presentation will be on the algorithm; specifics on how the techniques may be used in spacecraft design will be not discussed.
A method is described for generating unstructured meshes of triangles or tetrahedra for computational domains of complex geometrical shape. To illustrate the power of the approach, it is applied to the solution of flows past several complete aircraft configurations. The advocated approach allows for the natural incorporation of mesh adaptivity and this is demonstrated for both inviscid and viscous computations in two and three dimensions.
A method for generating high quality unstructured triangular grids for high Reynolds number Navier-Stokes calculations about complex geometries is described. Careful attention is paid in the mesh generation process to resolving efficiently the disparate length scales which arise in these flows. First the surface mesh is constructed in a way which ensures that the geometry is faithfully represented. The volume mesh generation then proceeds in two phases thus allowing the viscous and inviscid regions of the flow to be meshed optimally. A solution-adaptive remeshing procedure which allows the mesh to adapt itself to flow features is also described. The procedure for tracking wakes and refinement criteria appropriate for shock detection are described. Although at present it has only been implemented in two dimensions, the grid generation process has been designed with the extension to three dimensions in mind. An implicit, higher-order, upwind method is also presented for computing compressible turbulent flows on these meshes. Two recently developed one-equation turbulence models have been implemented to simulate the effects of the fluid turbulence. Results for flow about a RAE 2822 airfoil and a Douglas three-element airfoil are presented which clearly show the improved resolution obtainable.
A general survey of grid generators is presented with a concern for understanding why grids are necessary, how they are applied, and how they are generated. After an examination of the need for meshes, the overall applications setting is established with a categorization of the various connectivity patterns. This is split between structured grids and unstructured meshes. Altogether, the categorization establishes the foundation upon which grid generation techniques are developed. The two primary categories are algebraic techniques and partial differential equation techniques. These are each split into basic parts, and accordingly are individually examined in some detail. In the process, the interrelations between the various parts are accented. From the established background in the primary techniques, consideration is shifted to the topic of interactive grid generation and then to adaptive meshes. The setting for adaptivity is established with a suitable means to monitor severe solution behavior. Adaptive grids are considered first and are followed by adaptive triangular meshes. Then the consideration shifts to the temporal coupling between grid generators and PDE-solvers. To conclude, a reflection upon the discussion, herein, is given.
A general survey of grid generators is presented with a concern for understanding why grids are necessary, how they are applied, and how they are generated. After an examination of the need for meshes, the overall applications setting is established with a categorization of the various connectivity patterns. This is split between structured grids and unstructured meshes. Altogether, the categorization establishes the foundation upon which grid generation techniques are developed. The two primary categories are algebraic techniques and partial differential equation techniques. These are each split into basic parts, and accordingly are individually examined in some detail. In the process, the interrelations between the various parts are accented. From the established background in the primary techniques, consideration is shifted to the topic of interactive grid generation and then to adaptive meshes. The setting for adaptivity is established with a suitable means to monitor severe solution behavior. Adaptive grids are considered first and are followed by adaptive triangular meshes. Then the consideration shifts to the temporal coupling between grid generators and PDE-solvers. To conclude, a reflection upon the discussion, herein, is given.
Primitives are presented that are designed to help users efficiently program irregular problems (e.g., unstructured mesh sweeps, sparse matrix codes, adaptive mesh partial differential equations solvers) on distributed memory machines. These primitives are also designed for use in compilers for distributed memory multiprocessors. Communications patterns are captured at runtime, and the appropriate send and receive messages are automatically generated.
Primitives are presented that are designed to help users efficiently program irregular problems (e.g., unstructured mesh sweeps, sparse matrix codes, adaptive mesh partial differential equations solvers) on distributed memory machines. These primitives are also designed for use in compilers for distributed memory multiprocessors. Communications patterns are captured at runtime, and the appropriate send and receive messages are automatically generated.
We present an extensible, object-oriented data model designed for field data entitled Field Model (FM). FM objects can represent a wide variety of fields, including fields of arbitrary dimension and node type. FM can also handle time-series data. FM achieves generality through carefully selected topological primitives and through an implementation that leverages the potential of templated C++. FM supports fields where the nodes values are paired with any cell type. Thus FM can represent data where the field nodes are paired with the vertices ("vertex-centered" data), fields where the nodes are paired with the D-dimensional cells in R(sup D) (often called "cell-centered" data), as well as fields where nodes are paired with edges or other cell types. FM is designed to effectively handle very large data sets; in particular FM employs a demand-driven evaluation strategy that works especially well with large field data. Finally, the interfaces developed for FM have the potential to effectively abstract field data based on adaptive meshes. We present initial results with a triangular adaptive grid in R(sup 2) and discuss how the same design abstractions would work equally well with other adaptive-grid variations, including meshes in R(sup 3).
The control of discretization error is critical to obtaining reliable simulation results. Re-cent progress has matured anisotropic mesh adaptation, which automates discretization error control for complex geometries. However, the meshing process can fail when geometric model Boundary REPresentation (BREP) tolerances are larger than boundary layer surface nor-mal and tangential spacing requirements. Geometry sources are often created in Mechanical Computer-Aided Design (MCAD) systems, which are designed to produce models for manufacturing and not the stricter requirements of viscous flow analysis. BREP tolerances are strained by three factors: the inherent complexity of the model (e.g., large range of scales and complex topology), the numerical difficulties arising from surface/surface intersections, and the omission of crucial data during export and translation. Manual preparation of geometry is commonly employed to enable expert-guided mesh generation, which severely inhibits work-flow automation. Accommodation of loose BREP tolerances is required for automated mesh processes, because barrier issues may not be detected until well into the solution process. To raise awareness of this class of geometry issues and their impact on simulation, a survey of these barrier issues is presented with example mitigation techniques. This awareness may also impact geometry creation workflows to prevent the introduction of these artifacts.
The impact of gigabit networking with Myrinet 2000 hardware and MPICH-GM software on a 2-way SMP Beowulf-class cluster for parallel unstructured adaptive mesh refinement using the PYRAMID library is described.
Viewgraphs on 2D and 3D hypersonic flows with unstructured meshes are presented. Topics covered include: mesh generation, mesh refinement, shock-shock interaction, velocity contours, mesh movement, vehicle bottom surface, and adapted meshes.
Engineering problems commonly require functional outputs of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations with specified accuracy. These simulations are performed with limited computational resources. Computable error estimates offer the possibility of quantifying accuracy on a given mesh and predicting a fine grid functional on a coarser mesh. Such an estimate can be computed by solving the flow equations and the associated adjoint problem for the functional of interest. An adjoint-based error correction procedure is demonstrated for transonic inviscid and subsonic laminar and turbulent flow. A mesh adaptation procedure is formulated to target uncertainty in the corrected functional and terminate when error remaining in the calculation is less than a user-specified error tolerance. This adaptation scheme is shown to yield anisotropic meshes with corrected functionals that are more accurate for a given number of grid points then isotropic adapted and uniformly refined grids.
Fortran 90 is a modern language that introduces many important new features beneficial for scientific programming. We discuss our experiences in plasma particle simulation and unstructured adaptive mesh refinement on supercomputers, illustrating the features of Fortran 90 that support the object-oriented methodology.
Parallel adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is an important numerical technique that leads to the efficient solution of many physical and engineering problems.
This viewgraph presentation reviews the use Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) in simulating the Crustal Dynamics of Earth's Surface. AMR simultaneously improves solution quality, time to solution, and computer memory requirements when compared to generating/running on a globally fine mesh. The use of AMR in simulating the dynamics of the Earth's Surface is spurred by future proposed NASA missions, such as InSAR for Earth surface deformation and other measurements. These missions will require support for large-scale adaptive numerical methods using AMR to model observations. AMR was chosen because it has been successful in computation fluid dynamics for predictive simulation of complex flows around complex structures.