Parallel adaptive refinement for unsteady flow calculations on 3D unstructured grids

A parallel adaptive refinement algorithm for three‐dimensional unstructured grids is presented. The algorithm is based on an hierarchical h‐refinement/derefinement scheme for tetrahedral elements.The algorithm has been fully parallelized for shared‐memory platforms via a domain decomposition of the mesh at the algebraic level. The effectiveness of the procedure is demonstrated with applications which involve unsteady compressible fluid flow. A parallel speedup study of the algorithm also is included. Published in 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.