Adaptive grid refinement for hydrodynamic flows

Abstract: An adaptive grid refinement method is presented for hydrodynamic flow simulation. It is meant for application to a wide range of realistic flow problems, so generality and flexibility of the method are essential. Directional refinement is developed to be used with unstructured hexahedral meshes, tensor-based refinement allows the implementation of many different refinement criteria. Good grid quality is assured by creating buffers of refined cells around relevant flow features. Tests are performed with two refinement criteria, based on the free surface and the Hessian matrix of the solution respectively; these show great increases in efficiency with respect to non-refined grids. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]