Improvements on Delaunay-based three-dimensional automatic mesh generator

This paper describes an automatic mesh generator providing tetrahedral meshes suitable in general for finite element simulations. The mesh generator is of the Delaunay type and the paper focuses on recent improvements relative to this a priori well-known method.     

A refined Newton’s mesh independence principle for a class of optimal shape design problems

Shape optimization is described by finding the geometry of a structure which is optimal in the sense of a minimized cost function with respect to certain constraints. A Newton’s mesh independence principle was very efficiently used to solve a certain class of optimal design problems in [6]. Here motivated by optimization considerations we show that under the same computational cost an even finer mesh independence principle can be given.     

Conforming Delaunay triangulations in 3D

We describe an algorithm which, for any piecewise linear complex (PLC) in 3D, builds a Delaunay triangulation conforming to this PLC. The algorithm has been implemented, and yields in practice a relatively small number of Steiner points due to the fact that it adapts to the local geometry of the PLC. It is, to our knowledge, the first practical algorithm devoted to this problem.     

Simulations of multiphase flows with multiple length scales using moving mesh interface tracking with adaptive meshing

In multiphase flows, the length scales of thin regions, such as thin films between nearly touching drops and thin threads formed during the interface pinch-off, are usually several orders of magnitude smaller than the size of the drops. In this paper, a number of extra length criteria for adaptive meshes are developed and implemented in the moving mesh interface tracking method to solve these multiple-length-scale problems with high fidelity. A nominal length scale based on the solutions of Laplace’s equations with the unit normal vectors of surfaces as the boundary conditions is proposed for the adaptive mesh refinement in the thin regions. For almost flat interfaces/boundaries which are near to the thin regions, the averaged length of the interior edges sharing the two nodes with the boundary edge is introduced for the mesh adaptation. The averaged length of the interfacial edges is used for the interior elements near the interfaces but outside of the thin regions. For the interior mesh away from the interfaces/boundaries, different averaged length scales based on the initial mesh are employed for the adaptive mesh refining and coarsening. Numerous cases are simulated to demonstrate the capability of the proposed schemes in handling multiple length scales, which include the relaxation and necking of an elongated droplet, droplet–droplet head-on approaching, droplet-wall interactions, and a droplet pair in a shear flow. The smallest length resolved for the thin regions is three orders of magnitude smaller than the largest characteristic length of the problem.     

Mesh quality effects on the accuracy of CFD solutions on unstructured meshes

The order of accuracy and error magnitude of node- and cell-centered schemes are examined on representative unstructured meshes and flowfield solutions for computational fluid dynamics. Specifically, we investigate the properties of inviscid and viscous flux discretizations for isotropic and highly stretched meshes using the Method of Manufactured Solutions. Grid quality effects are studied by randomly perturbing the base meshes and cataloguing the error convergence as a function of grid size. For isotropic grids, node-centered approaches produce less error than cell-centered approaches. Moreover, a corrected node-centered scheme is shown to maintain third order accuracy for the inviscid terms on arbitrary triangular meshes. In contrast, for stretched meshes, cell-centered schemes are favored, with cell-centered prismatic approaches in particular showing the lowest levels of error. In three dimensions, simple flux integrations on non-planar control volume faces lead to first-order solution errors, while second-order accuracy is recovered by triangulation of the non-planar faces.     

Optimal adaptive grids of least-squares finite element methods in two spatial dimensions

This article concerns a procedure to generate optimal adaptive grids for convection dominated problems in two spatial dimensions based on least-squares finite element approximations. The procedure extends a one dimensional equidistribution principle which minimizes the interpolation error in some norms. The idea is to select two directions which can reflect the physics of the problems and then apply the one dimensional equidistribution principle to the chosen directions. Model problems considered are the two dimensional convection-diffusion problems where boundary and interior layers occur. Numerical results of model problems illustrating the efficiency of the proposed scheme are presented. In addition, to avoid skewed mesh in the optimal grids generated by the algorithm, an unstructured local mesh smoothing will be considered in the least-squares approximations. Comparisons with the Gakerkin finite element method will also be provided.     

Adaptive simplification of huge sets of terrain grid data for geosciences applications

We propose and discuss a new Lepp-surface method able to produce a small triangular approximation of huge sets of terrain grid data by using a two-goal strategy that assures both small approximation error and well-shaped 3D triangles. This is a refinement method which starts with a coarse initial triangulation of the input data, and incrementally selects and adds data points into the mesh as follows: for the edge e having the highest error in the mesh, one or two points close to (one or two) terminal edges associated with e are inserted in the mesh. The edge error is computed by adding the triangle approximation errors of the two triangles that share e, while each L₂-norm triangle error is computed by using a curvature tensor (a good approximation of the surface) at a representative point associated with both triangles. The method produces triangular approximations that capture well the relevant features of the terrain surface by naturally producing well-shaped triangles. We compare our method with a pure L₂-norm optimization method.     

High order numerical approximation of minimal surfaces

We present an algorithm for finding high order numerical approximations of minimal surfaces with a fixed boundary. The algorithm employs parametrization by high order polynomials and a linearization of the weak formulation of the Laplace–Beltrami operator to arrive at an iterative procedure to evolve from a given initial surface to the final minimal surface. For the steady state solution we measure the approximation error in a few cases where the exact solution is known. In the framework of parametric interpolation, the choice of interpolation points (mesh nodes) is directly affecting the approximation error, and we discuss how to best update the mesh on the evolutionary surface such that the parametrization remains smooth. In our test cases we may achieve exponential convergence in the approximation of the minimal surface as the polynomial degree increases, but the rate of convergence greatly differs with different choices of mesh update algorithms. The present work is also of relevance to high order numerical approximation of fluid flow problems involving free surfaces.     

Laplace–Beltrami enhancement for unstructured two-dimensional meshes having dendritic elements and boundary node movement

The Laplace–Beltrami mesh enhancement algorithm of Hansen et al. ,  and  has been implemented and broadened to include meshes containing dendritic elements and allowing for boundary node movement. This implementation operates on an unstructured two-dimensional mesh by forming an equivalent weak statement using finite element interpolation, assembly, and solution ideas to iteratively place those nodes allowed to move. Moving boundary nodes are constrained to follow the boundary geometry described as a Wilson–Fowler spline (e.g., [3, Section 2.1.3.1]). Implementation details concerning the element basis set modifications, the metric tensor for dendritic element treatment and boundary node movement are presented. Laplacian (e.g., [6]) enhancement is included as a special case. Results are presented which illustrate the algorithm for three test problems.     

A priori mesh quality metric error analysis applied to a high-order finite element method

Characterization of computational mesh’s quality prior to performing a numerical simulation is an important step in insuring that the result is valid. A highly distorted mesh can result in significant errors. It is therefore desirable to predict solution accuracy on a given mesh. The HiFi/SEL high-order finite element code is used to study the effects of various mesh distortions on solution quality of known analytic problems for spatial discretizations with different order of finite elements. The measured global error norms are compared to several mesh quality metrics by independently varying both the degree of the distortions and the order of the finite elements. It is found that the spatial spectral convergence rates are preserved for all considered distortion types, while the total error increases with the degree of distortion. For each distortion type, correlations between the measured solution error and the different mesh metrics are quantified, identifying the most appropriate overall mesh metric. The results show promise for future a priori computational mesh quality determination and improvement.