Computations of unsteady viscous compressible flows using adaptive mesh refinement in curvilinear body-fitted grid systems

Abstract

A methodology for accurate and efficient simulation of unsteady, compressible flows is presented. The cornerstones of the methodology are a special discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations on structured body-fitted grid systems and an efficient solution-adaptive mesh refinement technique for structured grids. The discretization employs an explicit multidimensional upwind scheme for the inviscid fluxes and an implicit treatment of the viscous terms. The mesh refinement technique is based on the AMR algorithm of Berger and Colella. In this approach, cells on each level of refinement are organized into a small number of topologically rectangular blocks, each containing several thousand cells. The small number of blocks leads to small overhead in managing data, while their size and regular topology means that a high degree of optimization can be achieved on computers with vector processors.