Abstract: | Recently, the domain‐free discretization (DFD) method was presented to efficiently solve problems with complex geometries without introducing the coordinate transformation. In order to exploit the high performance of the DFD method, in this paper, the local DFD method with the use of Cartesian mesh is presented, where the physical domain is covered by a Cartesian mesh and the local DFD method is applied for numerical discretization. In order to further improve the efficiency of the solver, the newly developed solution‐based adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technique is also introduced. The proposed methods are then applied to the simulation of natural convection in concentric annuli between a square outer cylinder and a circular inner cylinder. Numerical experiments show that the present numerical results agree very well with available data in the literature, and AMR‐enhanced local DFD method is an effective tool for the computation of flow problems. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |