ABSTRACT

This book is primarily concerned with mappings from one geometric object to another
. This statement from the first chapter summarizes very well the contents of this t
extbook concerned with the generation of structured grids in Euclidean space. Th
e book is divided into two different parts. The first one (Chapters 1 to 5) give
s an introduction to the generation of one- and two-dimensional structured grids
. Basically the reader learns about the construction of maps from the logical sp
ace to the physical which map a uniform grid in logical space to the desired gri
d in the physical space. Solution adaptivity is introduced via the usage of appr
opriate weighing functions. Although the main interest of the authors lies on th
e variational approach using elliptic partial differential equations in order to
construct these mappings, other approaches like transfinite interpolation and h
yperbolic grid generators are also discussed and the basic algorithms are presen
ted. Assuming only the knowledge of basic calculus all necessary concepts includ
ing basic differential geometry and finite difference techniques are exposed in
an intuitive manner. This sometimes results in some gaps in the presentation of
the underlying mathematical theory but should make this part of the book readabl
e also for non-mathematicians. The second part of the book is devoted to the aut
hors own research in the area of grid generation, which centers around advanced
variational grid generation methods. This part is written in a more rigorous man
ner. Again all needed concepts (calculus of variations, tensor analysis) are exp
lained and used to derive several algorithms, as e.g. area-orthogonality, refere
nce grids, Winslow and more. Approaches for three-dimensional grids and grids on
curves and surfaces are presented. This paper ends with a discussion of contrav
ariant functionals as an approach for solution adaptive grids. The reader should
be aware that this is a book about structured grids; the large area of unstruct
ured grids is not covered. However, for structured grids this book can be consid
ered as a good source for those who want to learn about the fundamentals and som
e details of their generation. For this purpose many exercises and projects are
included as well as a diskette containing the FORTRAN code of many of the algori
thms discussed. Finally a gallery of grids shows the results of the algorithms on a nu
mber of different shaped domains.