Practical Example of Curved Block Structure Generated by Advancing Front and Final Mesh
Résumé
This animation has been realized using ParaView [1] and aims to demonstrate the different steps of an algorithm developed to generate block-structured meshes suitable for Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations of flows around vehicles during atmospheric re-entry. This method takes a tetrahedral mesh of the domain as input and the quadrangular block discretization of the vehicle surface. A linear blocking is obtained using an advancing front algorithm. This means it is incrementally created from the vehicle surface, layer by layer. Some distance and vector fields are computed on the tetrahedral mesh to lead the block's extrusion direction. Then, the linear blocking is curved, and the final mesh is generated. The algorithm is freely available and implemented in the open-source C++ meshing framework GMDS [2,3]. The algorithm is based on the previous work of Ruiz-Gironés et al. [4,5]. Details of the algorithm are available in [6,7]. Here, the algorithm generates a mesh around a vehicle with two wings. This block structure is generated on four different layers. The creation of the first layer of blocks is shown here, block by block. [1] https://www.paraview.org/ [2] https://github.com/LIHPC- Computational- Geometry/gmds [3] Franck Ledoux, Jean-Claude Weill, and Yves Bertrand. Gmds: A generic mesh data structure. 17th International Meshing Roundtable, 2008. [4] Eloi Ruiz-Gironés. Automatic hexahedral meshing algorithms: from structured to unstructured meshes. PhD thesis, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), 2011. [5] Eloi Ruiz-Gironés, Xevi Roca, and Josep Sarrate. The receding front method applied to hexahedral mesh generation of exterior domains. Engineering with computers, 28(4):391–408, 2012. [6] Claire Roche, Jérôme Breil, Simon Calderan, Thierry Hocquellet, and Franck Ledoux. Curved hexahedral block structure generation by advancing front. In SIAM International Meshing Roundtable Workshop 2024 (SIAM IMR24), 2024. [7] Claire Roche, Jérôme Breil, Thierry Hocquellet, and Franck Ledoux. Block-structured quad meshing for supersonic flow simulations. In SIAM International Meshing Roundtable Workshop 2023 (SIAM IMR23), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, March 2023.