Date of Award

8-26-2022

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Advisor(s)

John Dannenhoffer

Keywords

elliptic grid generation, grid generation, hyperbolic grid generation, overset grids, structrued grids

Subject Categories

Engineering | Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

Numerical grid generation has been a bottleneck in the computational fluid dynamics process for a long time when using the structured overset grids. Many current structured overset grid generation schemes like the hyperbolic grid generation method require significant user interaction to generate good computational grids robustly. Other grid generation schemes like the elliptic grid generation method take a significant amount of time for grid calculation, which is not desirable for computational fluid dynamics.

Herein a new grid generation method is presented that combines the hyperbolic grid generation scheme with the elliptic grid generation scheme that uses Poisson’s equation. The new scheme builds upon the strengths of the different techniques by first applying hyperbolic grid generation, which is very fast but sometimes fails in strong concavities, and then using elliptic grid generation to locally fix the problems where hyperbolic grid generation results are not acceptable for computational fluid dynamics calculation. The new technique is demonstrated in various examples that are known to cause problems for either hyperbolic or elliptic grid generation when applied alone. The computational speed of the combined scheme grid generation is also exanimated by comparing the results with hyperbolic and elliptic grid generation.

The combined grid generation scheme is further implemented in Engineering Sketch Pad to get useful near-body structure grids based on the geometry of the model. Attributes in Engineering Sketch Pad are used to define the places where the surface and volume grids should be generated, while the tessellations are used to locate and project grid generation results and therefore boost grid generation speed. Three cases are tested to illustrate the implementation of the combined grid generation scheme in Engineering Sketch Pad.

Access

Open Access

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