Tailoring Unstructured Meshes for Use with 3D Co-Volume Methods for Engineering Analysis

Computational techniques have become increasingly important with the rapid advancements in technology in areas such as computational fluid dynamics and computational electromagnetic. Over many years, various approaches have been developed for the solution of the governing equations. The most efficient techniques require a structured subdivision of the domain. This normally constrains the problem to simple geometries. Unstructured type meshes provide the geometrical flexibility necessary for simulating the full range of industrial problems. However, simulations involving geometries of industrial interest can be expected to place severe demands on current computational resources, in terms of both cpu time and memory requirements.
The present proposal aims at developing a new meshing technique that enable the use of co-volume solution schemes on unstructured meshes, hence, maintaining the efficiency of the structured based solution algorithms and the flexibility of the unstructured subdivision of complex industrial geometries.

Industrial computer simulation technology has generally improved significantly over the past two decades, with the main improvements resulting from the optimisation of existing solution algorithms for implementation on modern computer platforms. However, important simplifications are made to the actual physics and to the geometry under consideration, in order to produce a solution in a time scale that can impact on the design cycle. Thus, industries, such as aerospace, still rely heavily on the results of experimental work and flight testing at the stage of data acquisition.
We believe that the successful completion of this work will create an opportunity for the development of new modelling tools that will possess the accuracy, speed and low memory requirements of structured grid algorithms, but maintaining the flexibility of the unstructured grid approach when applied to complex industrial geometries. The expected improvement in computational performance will also enable engineers to meet the growing industrial need of incorporating more physics into the process of analysing the performance of new designs. We anticipate that these developments will impact on many industrial application areas. For example, in aerospace, academics can use the web portal and direct their research into the development of alternative simulation tools that will meet the current requirements and assist the industry in reaching the goals of its 2020 vision and beyond.