Numerical simulation of unsteady flows with strong shocks using adaptive unstructured meshes

Abstract

Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Mauritius, 11-13 July, 2011.

In the present work numerical simulations of un- steady flows with moving shocks are presented. An unsteady mesh adaptation method, based on error equidistribution criteria, is adopted to capture the most important flow features. The modifications to the topology of the grid are locally interpreted in terms of continuous deformation of the finite volumes built around the nodes. The Arbitrary Lagrangian Eule- rian formulation of the Euler equations is then apply to compute the flow variable over the new grid with- out resorting to any explicit interpolation step. The numerical results shows an increase in the accuracy of the solution, together with a strong reduction of the computational costs, with respect to uniform-grid computations using a larger number of nodes.