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Clipping polygon faces through a polyhedron of vision

A flight simulator combines flight data and polygon face terrain data to provide a CRT display at each window of the simulated aircraft. The data base specifies the relative position of each vertex of each polygon face therein. Only those terrain faces currently appearing within the pyramid of vision defined by the pilots eye and the edges of the pilots window need be displayed at any given time. As the orientation of the pyramid of vision changes in response to flight data, the displayed faces are correspondingly displaced, eventually moving out of the pyramid of vision. Faces which are currently not visible (outside the pyramid of vision) are clipped from the data flow. In addition, faces which are only partially outside of pyramid of vision are reconstructed to eliminate the outside portion. Window coordinates are generated defining the distance between each vertex and each of the boundary planes forming the pyramid of vision. The sign bit of each window coordinate indicates whether the vertex is on the pyramid of vision side of the associated boundary panel (positive), or on the other side thereof (negative). The set of sign bits accompanying each vertex constitute the outcode of that vertex. The outcodes (O.C.) are systematically processed and examined to determine which faces are completely inside the pyramid of vision (Case A--all signs positive), which faces are completely outside (Case C--All signs negative) and which faces must be reconstructed (Case B--both positive and negative signs).

Rohner, Michel A.↗

The design and application of upwind schemes on unstructured meshes

Solution and mesh generation algorithms for solving the Euler equations on unstructured meshes consisting of triangle and quadrilateral control volumes are presented. Cell-centered and mesh-vertex upwind finite-volume schemes are developed which utilize multi-dimensional monotone linear reconstruction procedures. These algorithms differ from existing algorithms (even on structured meshes). Numerical results in two dimensions are presented.

Barth, Timothy J.↗

Simulation of a Periodic Jet in a Crossflow with a RANS Solver Using an Unstructured Grid

A second-order unstructured-grid code, developed and used primarily for steady aerodynamic simulations, is applied to the synthetic jet in a cross flow. The code, FUN3D, is a vertex-centered finite-volume method originally developed by Anderson[1, 2], and is currently supported by members of the Fast Adaptive Aerospace Tools team at NASA Langley. Used primarily for design[3] and analysis[4] of steady aerodynamic configurations, FUN3D incorporates a discrete adjoint capability, and supports parallel computations using MPI. A detailed description of the FUN3D code can be found in the references given above. The code is under continuous development and contains a variety of flux splitting algorithms for the inviscid terms, two methods for computing gradients, several turbulence models, and several solution methodologies; all in varying states of development. Only the most robust and reliable components, based on experiences with steady aerodynamic simulations, were employed in this work. As applied in this work, FUN3D solves the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations using the one equation turbulence model of Spalart and Allmaras[5]. The spatial discretization is formed on unstructured meshes using a vertex-centered approach. The inviscid terms are evaluated by a flux-difference splitting formulation using least-squares reconstruction and Roe-type approximate Riemann fluxes. Green-Gauss gradient evaluations are used for viscous and turbulence modeling terms. The discrete spatial operator is combined with a backward time operator which is then solved iteratively using point or line Gauss-Seidel and local time stepping in a pseudo time. For steady flows, the physical time step is set to infinity and the pseudo time step is ramped up with the iteration count. A second-order backward in time operator is used for time accurate flows with 20 to 50 steps in the pseudo time applied at each physical time step. For this effort, FUN3D was modified to support spatially varying boundary and initial conditions, and unsteady boundary conditions. Also, a specialized in/out flow boundary condition was implemented to model the action of the diaphragm. This boundary condition is described below in more detail. The grids were generated using the internally developed codes GridEX[6] for meshing the surfaces and inviscid regions of the domain, and for CAD access; and MesherX[7] for meshing the viscous regions. Grid spacing in on the surfaces and in the inviscid regions are indirectly controlled by specifying sources. The viscous layers are generated using an advancing layer technique. MeshersX allows the user to control the spatial variation of the first step off the surface, growth rates, and the termination criterion by providing small problem dependent subroutines.

Atkins, H. L.↗

An automated computerized vision technique for determination of three-dimensional object geometry

It is very important to determine three dimensional geometry of objects quickly in various military, space, construction, and industrial applications. An automatic scheme to obtain three dimensional geometry of objects by employing only one camera is presented. At present, this technique is applicable to a limited category of objects, satisfying the following constraints: they are flat-surfaces, and all the vertex points have to be recognized as corner points of the two dimensional image. The scheme consists of corner detection, data communication, camera calibration techniques and point searching and matching, edge cancelation, and creation procedures. An L shaped model is chosen as a test object. Experimental results demonstrated the reconstruction of this object geometry within 5 mm discrepancy. This scheme is quite convenient, efficient to use and can be applied to a wide range of problems in the real world.

Chiang, Pen-Tai↗

Revisiting the Least-squares Procedure for Gradient Reconstruction on Unstructured Meshes

The accuracy of the least-squares technique for gradient reconstruction on unstructured meshes is examined. While least-squares techniques produce accurate results on arbitrary isotropic unstructured meshes, serious difficulties exist for highly stretched meshes in the presence of surface curvature. In these situations, gradients are typically under-estimated by up to an order of magnitude. For vertex-based discretizations on triangular and quadrilateral meshes, and cell-centered discretizations on quadrilateral meshes, accuracy can be recovered using an inverse distance weighting in the least-squares construction. For cell-centered discretizations on triangles, both the unweighted and weighted least-squares constructions fail to provide suitable gradient estimates for highly stretched curved meshes. Good overall flow solution accuracy can be retained in spite of poor gradient estimates, due to the presence of flow alignment in exactly the same regions where the poor gradient accuracy is observed. However, the use of entropy fixes has the potential for generating large but subtle discretization errors.

Mavriplis, Dimitri J.↗

Time integration algorithms for the two-dimensional Euler equations on unstructured meshes

Explicit and implicit time integration algorithms for the two-dimensional Euler equations on unstructured grids are presented. Both cell-centered and cell-vertex finite volume upwind schemes utilizing Roe's approximate Riemann solver are developed. For the cell-vertex scheme, a four-stage Runge-Kutta time integration, a fourstage Runge-Kutta time integration with implicit residual averaging, a point Jacobi method, a symmetric point Gauss-Seidel method and two methods utilizing preconditioned sparse matrix solvers are presented. For the cell-centered scheme, a Runge-Kutta scheme, an implicit tridiagonal relaxation scheme modeled after line Gauss-Seidel, a fully implicit lower-upper (LU) decomposition, and a hybrid scheme utilizing both Runge-Kutta and LU methods are presented. A reverse Cuthill-McKee renumbering scheme is employed for the direct solver to decrease CPU time by reducing the fill of the Jacobian matrix. A comparison of the various time integration schemes is made for both first-order and higher order accurate solutions using several mesh sizes, higher order accuracy is achieved by using multidimensional monotone linear reconstruction procedures. The results obtained for a transonic flow over a circular arc suggest that the preconditioned sparse matrix solvers perform better than the other methods as the number of elements in the mesh increases.

Slack, David C.↗