parameters used in the code. The time breakdown is shown in Table 1. With the present procedure a mesh of 10 5 cells requires about 191 s of CPU time. It can be seen that the most expensive part of the algorithm is the elimination of nodes of degree higher than seven. The cause of this inef ciency has not been tracked in detail but must be attributed to a bad practice in the implementation of the algorithm. If the node-degree homogenization techniques are not employed, then the time is reduced to 70 s approximately.It has been reported 2 that the time necessary to generate a twodimensionalgrid with 10 5 elements it is about 17 s on an SGI Indigo 2 R4400. The same author claims that the equivalent method for the generation of a surface grid requires three times as much CPUtime as the two-dimensional planar procedure. Thus the total cost can be estimated in about 1 min of CPU time, which is more or less the same amount obtained if the node-degree homogenization technique is removed from Table 1.
ConclusionsA method for the ef cient generation of unstructured grids on arbitrary surfaces based in Steiner triangulations has been presented. The mesh-generation system uses an internal representation of the surface to isolate the grid-generation and CAD systems. The algorithm does not need the tracking of fronts, and therefore its implementation is attractive because of its simplicity. A special lter has been devised to avoid the generation of sawtooth patterns on the surface during the early stages of the gridding process, and this has proved to be an essential part of the method. The quality of the surface and planar grids obtained by the present approach are similar, but still below the attainable by means of an AF point-placement strategy.
AcknowledgmentsThis project has been funded by the Industria de Turbo Propulsores under Contract ITP-002-96 to the School of Aeronautics of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and its permission to publish this Note is gratefully acknowledged.The authors would like to thank R. Gómez for an early implementation of a constrained version of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm and J. M. Barroso for help and useful comments during the development of this work. Nomenclature C D = particle drag coef cient D = dissipation factor; Eq.(2) d p = particle diameter f i = volume fraction of region i n 0 0 = particle number ux U p = mean streamwise relative velocity of a particle u, v = instantaneous streamwise and cross-stream gas velocitȳ u,v = mean streamwise and cross-stream gas velocitȳ u 0 ,v 0 = rms uctuating streamwise and cross-stream velocity e = local rate of dissipation of turbulence kinetic energy } = average generic property of the overall ow } i = average generic property of region i of the ow Subscripts i = turbulent interwake region w = particle wake region