Automatic curved block structure and hexahedral mesh generation for hypersonic CFD
Paper ·Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering 461 (2026)
Authors: Claire Roche, Jérôme Breil, Simon Calderan, Thierry Hocquellet, Franck Ledoux
Hexahedral block-structured meshes are known as difficult to generate and are usually created manually using specialized interactive software.
For industrial complex geometries, this process is highly time-consuming and hinders the numerical simulation process.
Currently, automatic hexahedral mesh generation is a complex and open area of research. While some techniques show promise, they still fail to provide a suitable input for numerical simulations.
In this work, we present a method for generating curved block-structured hexahedral meshes of the fluid domain surrounding vehicles for use in flow simulations of re-entry vehicles.
This method is decomposed as follows: First, a linear block structure is extruded from the initial vehicle surface discretization using an advancing front process.
Once this linear block structure has been generated, the block structure is curved a posteriori using Bézier polynomials.
This improves the representation of the vehicle surface. Next, we generate a linear mesh from the curved blocks under constraints.
The quality of the generated mesh is evaluated in two ways: First, we analyze it using purely geometrical criteria and then we use obtained meshed for numerical simulations of flows around re-entry vehicles.
Paper available on ScienceDirect