Applications and Generalizations of Variational Methods for Generating Adaptive Meshes,

Abstract

Generating computation meshes for irregular regions have been of interest to a lot of people in many areas of research for a long time. One technique that has met with sucess over the long run has been to generate methods using an elliptic equation or a system of elliptic equations. The technique in its simplest form, uses a system of Laplace equations which are solved by direct or iterative methods. As people gained more experience with this method, source terms were added to the Laplace equations to gain additional control of the mesh. In variable coefficients of the derivatives were added for further flexibility. In this paper the authors work with a method that systematically generates a set of elliptic equations without having to explicitly perturb a set of Laplace equations with source terms and variable coefficients. This technique uses the variational methods often associated with elliptic equations. Following this introduction, they briefly discuss the variational formulation in two-dimensional cartesian geometry. Then the formulation will be generalized to three dimensions. Next, several three-dimensional test problems will be shown. After displaying these three-dimensional test results, the author wil the exhibit an application of the mesh generation technique in two dimensions. This application involves generating an adaptive mesh for a supersonic flow past a step in a wind tunnel. (Author)

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1982
Accession Number
ADP001008

Entities

People

  • Jeffrey Saltzman
  • Jeremiah Brackbill

Organizations

  • Los Alamos National Laboratory

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Coordinate Systems
  • Demographic Cohorts
  • Differential Equations
  • Equations
  • Geometry
  • Partial Differential Equations
  • Supersonic Flow
  • Three Dimensional
  • Two Dimensional
  • Variational Methods
  • Wind Tunnels

Readers

  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Hypersonics
  • Hypersonics - Hypersonic Flow