Conforming Adaptive Hexahedral Mesh Refinement for Spectral-Element Simulation of Turbulent Flows
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Efficiency is crucial in engineering, particularly in transportation, where reducing aerodynamic drag lowers energy consumption. Achieving this requires accurate numerical tools to support design optimization, with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) playing a central role. GPU-accelerated solvers like SOD2D, based on high-order spectral hexahedral elements in the Continuous Galerkin framework, enable efficient computations but demand fully hexahedral meshes, which are challenging to generate automatically. To address this, we propose a mesh refinement strategy leveraging the duality between tetrahedral and hexahedral discretizations. This approach systematically refines meshes while maintaining conforming hexahedral elements, avoiding non-conforming interfaces. By combining the geometric flexibility of tetrahedral meshes with the computational efficiency of spectral hexahedra, our method facilitates high-fidelity, GPU-accelerated aerodynamic simulations in complex industrial geometries.
