On the Use of General Elements in Fluid Dynamics Simulations

Chalasani, S., Senguttuvan, V., Thompson, D., & Luke, E. (2008). On the Use of General Elements in Fluid Dynamics Simulations. Communications in Numerical Methods in Engineering. New York: John Wiley and Sons. 24(6), 435-448. DOI:10.1002/cnm.1017.

As flow solvers have become more sophisticated, many now have the capability to handle meshes with general polyhedral elements, i.e. general elements. In response, researchers have begun to develop mesh generation strategies that exploit nonstandard element types. General elements have been employed locally in near-body extruded meshes to improve mesh quality and have also been used in solution adaptive mesh refinement algorithms. In this paper, we present two mesh generation strategies that employ general elements. We also discuss how a specific flow solver is formulated to work with general elements. We demonstrate our approach by presenting simulation results for two realistic configurations. We close with a discussion that highlights future research directions.