Development of a 2-D flow solver on unstructured and adaptive Cartesian meshes

Abstract

A two-dimensional flow solver using mixed grids has been developed for accurate and efficient simulation of steady and unsteady flow fields. The flow solver was cast to accommodate two different topologies of computational meshes: unstructured triangular meshes in the near-body region such that complex geometric configurations can be easily modeled, while unstructured adaptive Cartesian meshes are utilized in the off-body region to resolve the flow more accurately with less numerical dissipation by adopting a spatially high-order accurate scheme and solution-adaptive mesh refinement technique. The unstructured adaptive Cartesian meshes can be generated automatically and allow to handle data efficiently via quad-tree data structures. A chimera mesh approach has been employed to link the two flow regimes adopting each mesh topology. A second-order accurate vertex-centered scheme and a 3(rd)- or 5(th)-order accurate cellcentered WENO scheme has been utilized in the near-body region and in the off-body region, respectively. Validations were made for the unsteady inviscid vortex convection and the steady and unsteady turbulent flows over an NACA0012 airfoil, and the results were compared with other computational and experimental results.