Simulation of Flow Past a Cylinder With Adaptive Spectral Element Method

The simulations of flow past a two-dimensional circular cylinder are conducted to investigate the feasibility of adaptive mesh refinement applied on curved spectral elements. The nonconforming spectral element method and adaptive meshes technique are used to the curve surfaces and observe whether any discontinuity of the solutions. The adaptive nonconforming spectral element method is implemented to compare with those obtained by conforming mesh method with respect to several existing numerical and experimental studies. Meanwhile, three kinds of estimated error base mesh adaptation are conducted to compare their accuracy and efficiency with conforming mesh method. The results show adaptive nonconforming mesh method is more efficient than the conforming method. Especially, the vorticity error based method performs highest accuracy and fastest convergence. The results show this mesh refinement technique is applicable on the curved elements with satisfactory accuracy. It releases this technique may be applied on the simulations of flow past objects with more general geometries.