Deformable Overset Grid for Multibody Unsteady Flow Simulation

Abstract

A deformable overset grid method is proposed to simulate the unsteady aerodynamic problems with multiple flexible moving bodies. This method uses an unstructured overset grid coupled with local mesh deformation to achieve both robustness and efficiency. The overset grid hierarchically organizes the subgrids into clusters and layers, allowing for overlapping/embedding of different type meshes, in which the mesh quality and resolution can be independently controlled. At each time step, mesh deformation is locally applied to the subgrids associated with deforming bodies by an improved Delaunay graph mapping method that uses a very coarse Delaunay mesh as the background graph. The graph is moved and deformed by the spring analogy method according to the specified motion, and then the computational meshes are relocated by a simple one-to-one mapping. An efficient implicit hole-cutting and intergrid boundary definition procedure is implemented fully automatically for both cell-centered and cell-vertex schemes based on the wall distance and an alternative digital tree data search algorithm. This method is successfully applied to several complex multibody unsteady aerodynamic simulations, and the results demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method for complex unsteady flow problems, particularly for those involving simultaneous large relative motion and self-deformation.