ADAPTIVE REMESHING FOR 3-DIMENSIONAL COMPRESSIBLE FLOW COMPUTATIONS

An adaptive mesh procedure for computing steady state solutions of the compressible Euler equations in three dimensions is presented. The method is an extension of previous work in two dimensions. The approach requires the coupling of a surface triangulator, an automatic tetrahedral mesh generator, a finite element flow solver and an error estimation procedure. An example involving flow at high Mach number is included to demonstrate the numerical performance of the proposed approach. The example shows that the use of this form of adaptivity in three dimensions offers the potential of even greater computational savings than those attained in the corresponding two-dimensional implementation. © 1992.