An Evaluation of Accuracy and Efficiency of a 3D Adaptive Mesh Refinement Method with Analytical Velocity Fields

Abstract

Appropriate mesh refinement plays a vital role in the accuracy and convergence of computational fluid dynamics solvers. This work is an extension of the previous work that further demonstrates the accuracy of the 3D adaptive mesh refinement method by comparing the accuracy measures between the ones derived from the analytical fields and those identified by the refined meshes. The adaptive mesh refinement method presented in this study is based on the law of mass conservation for three-dimensional incompressible or compressible steady fluid flows. The assessment of the performance of the adaptive mesh refinement method considers its key features such as drawing closed streamline and identification of singular points, asymptotic planes, and vortex axis. Several illustrative examples of the applications of the 3D mesh refinement method with a multi-level refinement confirm the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that the adaptive mesh refinement method can provide accurate and reliable qualitative measures of 3D computational fluid dynamics problems.