Unstructured Tetrahedral Mesh Generation for Three-Dimensional Viscous Flows

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Vol 39, Num 4, pp.549 - 567, February 1996

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

E. Probert
EBMS, University of Wales, Swansea SA2 8PP, U.K.

J. Peraire
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT, Cambridge MA 02139, U.S.A.

Abstract

A method of generating general tetrahedral meshes suitable for use in viscous flow simulations is proposed. The approach which is followed consists of the initial generation of a number of unstructured layers of highly stretched elements, in the vicinity of solid walls, followed by the discretisation of the remainder of the domain, by a standard advancing front procedure. The numerical performance of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by the generation of meshes suitable for viscous flow analysis over a number of three-dimensional aerodynamic configurations of current practical interest.