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Unstructured grid generation

UNSTRUCTURED GRID GENERATION: An unstructured (or irregular) grid is a tessellation of a part of the Euclidean plane or Euclidean space by simple shapes, such as triangles or tetrahedra, in an irregular pattern. Grids of this type may be used in finite element analysis when the input to be analyzed has an irregular shape. Unlike structured grids, unstructured grids require a list of the connectivity which specifies the way a given set of vertices make up individual elements. Ruppert's algorithm is often used to convert an irregularly shaped polygon into an unstructured grid of triangles.

Example of unstructured mesh. In addition to triangles and tetrahedral, other commonly used elements in finite element simulation include quadrilateral (4-noded) and hexahedra (8-noded) elements in 2D and 3D, respectively. One of the most commonly used algorithms to generate unstructured quadrilateral grid is "Paving. However, there is no such commonly used algorithm for generating unstructured hexahedra grid on a general 3D solid model. "Plastering" is a 3D version of Paving, but it has difficulty in forming hexahedral elements at the interior of a solid. Unstructured grids have progressively become the dominating approach to industrial CFD, due to the impossibility to generate automatically block-structured grids on arbitrary geometries. It is indeed nearly impossible, for topology-connected reasons, to envisage an automatic block-structured grid generator without an a priori knowledge of the involved topologies. However, this is possible with unstructured grids and therefore unstructured flow solvers for the NavierStokes equations have gained wide acceptance. Although on a same regular distribution of points, an unstructured grid, formed for instance by triangles in 2D, will tend to have a lower accuracy than the corresponding structured grid, this trend has arisen because of the industrial requirements for automatic grid generation tools.

Unstructured grid generation

One of the advantages of unstructured grids is the possibility to perform local refinements in a certain region, without affecting the grid point distribution outside that region. This opens the way for flexible grid adaptation by local refinement or local coarsening, based on some criteria associated either to some flow gradients or to some error estimation. Grid adaptation is based on the addition or removal of mesh points in order to increase the accuracy in regions of strong flow variations and by removing points in regions where the solutions has already reached an acceptable accuracy. This process has as objective to optimize the number of grid points for a certain level of accuracy. The space domain can be discretized by subdivision of the continuum into elements of arbitrary shape and size. Since any polygonal structure with rectilinear or curved sides can finally be reduced to triangular and quadrilateral elements, they form the basis for the most current space subdivision in 2D space. Cells with an arbitrary number of faces can also be considered, resulting from a dual grid construction, or from an agglomeration process of groups of cells into coarser cells, as required by multigrid methods. The only restriction is that the elements may not overlap and have to cover the complete computational domain. Most of the unstructured grid generators applied in practice are focused on the generation of basic cell shapes formed by: Triangle/tetrahedra elements; Hybrid elements involving combinations of tetrahedra, pyramids and prisms, the latter being concentrated near the solid surfaces; Quadrilaterals and hexahedra. TRIANGLE/TETRAHEDRA CELLS: Various methods are available to generate triangular/tetrahedral grids around arbitrary bodies. Most of them require an initial surface triangulation, which has to be generated first, before launching the generation of the volume mesh.

Example of an unstructured triangular grid

HYBRID CELLS: The main difficulty with triangular/tetrahedral grids is connected to the boundary layer requirements of high Reynolds number flows, where the grid density in the normal direction has to be adapted to the boundary layer velocity profiles. The mesh aspect ratios x/ y of the order of

Unstructured grid generation

1000, for typical industrial flows, which would lead to very poorly configured triangles with height to base ratios of that order and, consequently, a significant loss of accuracy. To avoid this problem, hybrid grids have been developed, whereby layers of quadrilaterals or prisms are generated in the near-wall region, by a form of extrusion process out of the triangulated surface grid.

Example of an unstructured hybrid grid showing the regular quadrilateral type structure near the solid walls

QUADRILATERAL/HEXAHEDRA CELLS: It is known from numerous simulations that hexahedra offer significant advantages compared to tetrahedral cells, in terms of memory requirements and accuracy. For tetrahedral grids, the ratio of the number of cells to the number of vertices is close to 6, not taking into account the boundaries. (For a two-dimensional triangulation this ratio is of the order of 3); while this ratio remains close to one for hexahedral cells.

Example for 2D quadrilateral grid around an airfoil ARBITRARY SHAPED ELEMENTS: The most general unstructured grid configuration is obtained with cells having an arbitrary number of faces. They can be defined either by considering the dual mesh of a base grid formed by simple shapes, or by an agglomeration process of cells.