At the AIAA Propulsion & Energy Forum 2020, the technical paper Robust, Efficient and Accurate Mesh Adaptation for Turbomachinery CFD Simulations was presented. This work by Pointwise’s Nick Wyman and Paul Galpin and Thorsten Hansen from ISimQ represents the latest update of our joint work on mesh adaptation including surface mesh adaptation constrained to the geometry model. Because the Forum was held virtually, the presentation was recorded and is now available for you to watch.

A new mesh adaptation procedure is developed that is well suited to challenging turbomachinery CFD simulations. The automated adaptation creates a mesh that robustly conforms to the underlying geometry, that respects user-defined locally anisotropic boundary layer mesh refinement for efficiency, and that is driven by an adaptation sensor that accurately resolves large as well as subtle secondary flow features. The method seeks to control numerical error in the discrete solution by minimizing the truncation error based on the CFD solver discretization. An adaptation sensor is developed for a node-centered finite volume CFD solver, including control over the rate that the mesh size increases with each adaptation step. The adaptation sensor is used to define a target size field for an updated discrete mesh conforming to the underlying CAD geometry. Examples of mesh adaptation for a heat transfer and a turbomachinery simulation are provided.

If you’re interested in accelerating your CFD solver’s convergence rate while also improving accuracy, be certain to watch this webinar today.