Strand Mesh Generation Using Minimum Distance Fields

Speaker: Beatrice Roget, Science and Technology Corp., NASA Ames Research Center
November 1, 2018

Presentation

Abstract

Anisotropic prismatic/strand meshes are often used to capture viscous boundary layer effects in RANS simulations of high Reynolds number flows. This presentation describes a new algorithm for generation of these prismatic meshes using the minimum distance field of the surface tesselation. The algorithm is based on initial point placement using both the closest point on this iso-surface, and the direction of best visibility. Initial point placement is followed by a smoothing operation based on an elastic spring analogy, which is constrained using the iso-surface of the distance field and the region of visibility for each node. Simulations are performed using a dual-mesh infrastructure, where the prismatic meshes transition to a Cartesian background mesh a short distance from the wall. This overset mesh system is then processed by a domain connectivity method to establish connections between self-intersecting strand meshes and strand/Cartesian mesh systems. Mesh and flow simulation results are presented for test cases of varying complexity.

Biography

Beatrice Roget completed her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland in 2004. She first worked as a research scientist at NASA Langley Research Center with the National Institute of Aerospace, then from 2009 at the University of Wyoming. In 2014, she joined the Science and Technology Corporation and the CREATE Helios development team at NASA Ames Research Center, where she developed a module to enable computational fluid dynamics simulations of arbitrarily complex flexible multi-body systems with hierarchical motions and deformations. Her research interests include control, optimization, meshing and high-performance computing.

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