Adaptive meshing techniques for viscous flow calculations on mixed element unstructured meshes

An adaptive refinement strategy based on hierarchical element subdivision is formulated and implemented for meshes containing arbitrary mixtures of tetrahedra, hexahedra, prisms, and pyramids. Special attention is given to keeping memory overheads as low as possible. This procedure is coupled with an algebraic multigrid flow solver, which operates on mixed element meshes. Inviscid flows, as well as viscous flows, are computed on adaptively refined tetrahedral, hexahedral, and hybrid meshes. The efficiency of the method is demonstrated by generating an adapted hexahedral mesh containing 3 million vertices on a relatively inexpensive workstation. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.