Adaptive p-finite element method for wind engineering

Abstract

An important goal of computational wind engineering is to impact the design process with simulations of flow around buildings and bridges. One challenging aspect of this goal is to solve the Navier-Stokes (NS) equations accurately. For the unsteady computations, an adaptive finite element technique may reduce the computer time and storage. The preliminary application of a p-version as well as an h-version adaptive technique to computational wind engineering has been reported in previous paper. The details on the implementation of p-adaptive technique will be discussed in this paper. In this technique, two posteriori error estimations, which are based on the velocity and vorticity, are first presented. Then, the polynomial order of the interpolation function is increased continuously element by element until the estimated error is less than the accepted. The second through sixth orders of hierarchical functions are used as the interpolation polynomials. Unequal order interpolations are used for velocity and pressure. Using the flow around a circular cylinder with Reynolds number of 1000 the two error estimators are compared. The result show that the estimated error based on the velocity is lower than that based on the vorticity.