A feature-based mesh adaptation for the unsteady high speed compressible flows in complex three-dimensional domains

Abstract

We propose an unstructured mesh adaptation approach for unsteady high speed compressible Navier–Stokes applications involving blasts and explosions with the presence of strong shock waves propagating in three dimensional complex domains. The idea is to identify the locations of critical physics locally and then re-mesh these regions based on solution derived metrics. The approach ensures both geometry fidelity and mesh validity, especially for areas near complex geometries, a task that is always a challenge in mesh adaptation. The proposed adaptivity is applied for simulations of blast wave propagations and compared with available data in literature. The results show that the proposed method is fully robust and efficient for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems in complex three-dimensional domains.