Comparison of Computational Fluid Dynamic Simulation of a Stirred Tank with Polyhedral and Tetrahedral Meshes

Abstract

This work compares the accuracy and calculation efficiency of various tetrahedral and polyhedral meshes in a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulation of a stirred tank. The polyhedral mesh was found leading to much fewer mesh cells than the tetrahedral one without missing the calculation accuracy. The CFD numerical simulation results of the polyhedral mesh better agree to the experimental data comparing to the tetrahedral one at the same mesh cell number. In addition, the results of polyhedral mesh were also found to be more accurate than the tetrahedral one which was refined by adaptive meshing based on the velocity gradient.

Keywords

• polyhedral
• tetrahedral mesh
• stirred tank
• cfd simulation