A Parallel Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement Approach for Complex Turbulent Shear Flows

Abstract

In numerical fluid dynamic simulations, adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) approaches have recently been growing in popularity, particularly when the target flow field includes complex turbulent shear flows such as jets, mixing layers, and shear layers in separated regions. In the AMR approach presented in this paper, for numerical simplicity and practicality we adopt a block-based method that uses a structured mesh in each block, a body-fitted coordinate system and a self-similar tree-based hierarchical data structure. We also implement measures that address memory/communication reduction and load balancing. As application examples we solve a separated flow around an airfoil, a transonic flow around a reentry capsule, and a coaxial jet flow. The examples demonstrate that the AMR approach is effective for capturing complex turbulent shear flows, although numerical issues such as scalability remain to be addressed for larger simulations.

Keywords

• parallel structured adaptive mesh refinement
• complex turbulent shear flows
• computational fluid dynamics