An Improved Bubble Packing Method for Unstructured Grid Generation with Application to Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

An improved bubble packing method (BPM) is proposed to generate high-quality unstructured grids for prediction of the flow field in a domain with complex geometry. For a curved-boundary domain, bubble departure from the curved boundaries during the dynamic movement of bubbles can be avoided by using the mapping and the arc-length parameterization methods. Furthermore, the grid density of the whole region can be controlled effectively. Local mesh refinement is achieved by adding bubbles with different sizes to the real and artificial vertices of the domain, and vertex information is transferred to the inner nodes of the domain using the Shepard interpolation method. In order to validate the proposed BPM, a finite-volume solver on an unstructured collocated grid is developed to simulate both square and polar lid-driven cavity flows. The numerical simulation results agree well with the experimental data under different Reynolds numbers.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 50976087), the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (No. 20090201110001) and the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-07–0661). The authors would like to acknowledge the beneficial discussion with Dr. Bing-chen Wang of the University of Manitoba, Canada.