Advancing-front block structure generation for atmospheric re-entry simulations

57th 3AF International Conference on Applied Aerodynamics, High speed aerodynamics, from transonic to hypersonic (AERO 2023) , Bordeaux, France.

Authors: Claire Roche, Jérôme Breil, Thierry Hocquellet, Franck Ledoux

Quad meshing is a very well-studied domain for many years. While the problem can be globally considered as solved, many approaches do not provide suitable inputs for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and in our case for supersonic flow simulations. Such simulations require a very strong control on the cell size and direction. To our knowledge, engineers ensure this control manually using interactive software. In this work we propose an automatic algorithm to generate full quadrilateral block structured mesh for the purpose of supersonic flow simulation. We handle some simulation input like the angle of attack and the boundary layer definition. Our approach generates adequate 2D meshes and is designed to be extensible in 3D.

Presentation available on 3AF
Proceeding available on SIAM IMR 2023