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Adaptive boundary layer meshing for viscous flow simulations

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Abstract

A procedure for anisotropic mesh adaptation accounting for mixed element types and boundary layer meshes is presented. The method allows to automatically construct meshes on domains of interest to accurately and efficiently compute key flow quantities, especially near wall quantities like wall shear stress. The new adaptive approach uses local mesh modification procedures in a manner that maintains layered and graded elements near the walls, which are popularly known as boundary layer or semi-structured meshes, with highly anisotropic elements of mixed topologies. The technique developed is well suited for viscous flow applications where exact knowledge of the mesh resolution over the computational domain required to accurately resolve flow features of interest is unknown a priori. We apply the method to two types of problem cases; the first type, which lies in the field of hemodynamics, involves pulsatile flow in blood vessels including a porcine aorta case with a stenosis bypassed by a graft whereas the other involves high-speed flow through a double throat nozzle encountered in the field of aerodynamics.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of this work by NSF grant ACI-0205741. We would also like to acknowledge that the solutions presented herein for blood flow simulations made use of the linear algebra library provided by AcuSim Software.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scientific Computation Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 12180, USA

    Onkar Sahni, Kenneth E. Jansen & Mark S. Shephard

  2. E350 Clark Center, Stanford University, 318 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Charles A. Taylor

  3. Simmetrix Inc, Clifton Park, NY, 12065, USA

    Mark W. Beall

Authors
  1. Onkar Sahni
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  2. Kenneth E. Jansen
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  3. Mark S. Shephard
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  4. Charles A. Taylor
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  5. Mark W. Beall
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Correspondence to Onkar Sahni.

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Sahni, O., Jansen, K.E., Shephard, M.S. et al. Adaptive boundary layer meshing for viscous flow simulations. Engineering with Computers 24, 267–285 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-008-0095-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-008-0095-0

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