Efficient Mesh Deformation Method Combined with the Moving Submesh Approach

Abstract

It is a challenging task to simulate the situation involving nonstationary motions, one crucial requirement of which is an efficient algorithm to realize the high-quality computational mesh deformation. The inverse distance weighting (IDW) method is a very simple mesh deformation method and the moving submesh approach (MSA) can improve the efficiency significantly. In this paper, by combining IDW with MSA, a new hybrid mesh deformation method (IDW-MSA) is proposed, which only depends on the point information of mesh and does not need to build large tables of mesh connectivity data. For the translation and rotation movements, the index parameter has different value ranges that affect mesh quality differently. The default settings of index parameter are 2.2 for translation and 6.0 for rotation, which have been shown to handle large deformations without difficulty. The results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of this algorithm via four test cases. From the point of deformed mesh quality, it is comparable to the disk relaxation algorithm and radial basis functions (RBFs). The computational cost can be reduced by more than an order of magnitude compared with the RBFs-MSA and spring analogy approach. For these benefits, the new algorithm has the capacity for unsteady flow simulations involving boundary movements.