Cross-field structured adaptive mesh using medial axis flow feature extraction

A method to generate feature-aligned anisotropic structured meshes automatically is presented for high resolution of two-dimensional complicated flow features such as normal and oblique shock waves, shock reflection, shock/shock interaction, and shock/boundary-layer interaction. The method starts from extraction of dominant flow features to be treated alongside geometric entities. This is followed by automatic generation of multiblock structured meshes of the flow domain using a cross-field based method so that the flow feature entities are embedded along with the geometries. The cross-field method allows for the automatic blocking so that anisotropic quadrilateral meshes generation and adaptation to resolve flow features can be carried out. The resulting mesh possesses high element quality for orthogonality and high resolution of the flow features, suitable for the shock capturing methods and higher-order reconstruction schemes. The method is demonstrated through a number of aerodynamic flow test cases with discussion on its efficiency, accuracy, and robustness.