Adaptive mesh refinement for chevron nozzle jet flows

In this paper an adaptive mesh generation procedure is presented for improving the resolution of the numerical simulation of a turbulent jet exhausting from a chevron nozzle. This procedure is based on the minimization of a variational integral whose integrand depends on the metric (also called the monitor function) induced by a curvilinear grid generated in the physical domain. Specifically, it leads to solving parabolic equations involving the monitor function, which is carefully designed to resolve the flow gradients, and which, in the present instance, is determined by the time-averaged axial velocity profile within the jet. This mesh redistribution strategy is incorporated into a flow computation code (that solves the compressible three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations using a prefactored optimized fourth-order compact difference scheme for spatial derivatives and the Beam-Warming method for the time derivative on a multi-block overset grid) and is demonstrated to be efficient and effective. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.