Anisotropic mesh adaptation : recovering quasi-structured meshes

An adaptive method for producing anisotropic quasi-structured meshes is presented in this thesis. Current anisotropic adaptation schemes produce meshes without any regular structure which can hurt accuracy and efficiency of the solution. By modifying the anisotropic adaptation schemes, producing aligned, quasi-structured meshes is possible which means that the accuracy and efficiency of the flow solution are improved. By using quasi-structured meshes, we can get the advantages of flexibility of unstructured meshes for complex geometries and accuracy of the high directional qualities of the structured meshes at the same time. The construction of the quasi-structured meshes from initial isotropic unstructured meshes is accomplished by assigning metrics to vertices based on the error estimation methods. The metrics are used to communicate the desired anisotropy to the meshing program. After assigning a metric to each vertex, the mesh is refined anisotropically using four mesh quality improvements operations to produce high quality anisotropic quasi-structured meshes: swapping to choose the diagonal of the quadrilateral formed by two neighboring triangles which results the maximum quality, inserting vertices for large triangles, vertex removal to eliminate small edges and vertex movements to optimize the location of the vertices so that quasi-structured meshes are created. The idea in the optimization process is to smooth a vertex location by seeking so that the final mesh contains target elements dictated by the metrics assigned in the three vertices of that triangle. The final, high quality mesh is produced by using these operations iteratively based on the metrics assigned to each vertex in an adaptive, solution-based process.Applied Science, Faculty ofMechanical Engineering, Department ofGraduat