Optimal Dual Schemes for Adaptive Grid Based Hexmeshing

Hexahedral meshes are a ubiquitous domain for the numerical resolution of partial differential equations. Computing a pure hexahedral mesh from an adaptively refined grid is a prominent approach to automatic hexmeshing, and requires the ability to restore the all hex property around the hanging nodes that arise at the interface between cells having different size. The most advanced tools to accomplish this task are based on mesh dualization. These approaches use topological schemes to regularize the valence of inner vertices and edges, such that dualizing the grid yields a pure hexahedral mesh. In this article, we study in detail the dual approach, and propose four main contributions to it: (i) We enumerate all the possible transitions that dual methods must be able to handle, showing that prior schemes do not natively cover all of them; (ii) We show that schemes are internally asymmetric, therefore not only their construction is ambiguous, but different implementative choices lead to hexahedral meshes with different singular structure; (iii) We explore the combinatorial space of dual schemes, selecting the minimum set that covers all the possible configurations and also yields the simplest singular structure in the output hexmesh; (iv) We enlarge the class of adaptive grids that can be transformed into pure hexahedral meshes, relaxing one of the tight topological requirements imposed by previous approaches. Our extensive experiments show that our transition schemes consistently outperform prior art in terms of ability to converge to a valid solution, amount and distribution of singular mesh edges, and element count. Last but not least, we publicly release our code and reveal a conspicuous amount of technical details that were overlooked in previous literature, lowering an entry barrier that was hard to overcome for practitioners in the field.

GPU-based Element-by-Element Strategies for Accelerating Topology Optimization of 3D Continuum Structures Using Unstructured All-Hexahedral Mesh

Topology optimization has been successful in generating optimal topologies of various structures arising in real-world applications. Since these applications can have complex and large domains, topology optimization suffers from a high computational cost because of the use of unstructured meshes for discretization of these domains and their finite element analysis (FEA). This paper addresses this challenge by developing three GPU-based element-by-element strategies targeting unstructured all-hexahedral mesh for the matrix-free precondition conjugate gradient (PCG) finite element solver. These strategies mainly perform sparse matrix multiplication (SpMV) arising with the FEA solver by allocating more compute threads of GPU per element. Moreover, the strategies are developed to use shared memory of GPU for efficient memory transactions. The proposed strategies are tested with solid isotropic material with penalization (SIMP) method on four examples of 3D structural topology optimization. Results demonstrate that the proposed strategies achieve speedup up to 8.2× over the standard GPU-based SpMV strategies from the literature.

Early fever detection on COVID-19 infection using thermoelectric module generators

In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly stopped society and changed human interaction. In this work, a thermoelectric generator wearable device for early fever detection symptoms is presented as a possible solution to avoid higher propagation of this disease. To identify a possible fever symptom, numerical and parametric simulations are developed using a highquality-refined hexahedral mesh. At first, a 2-pair-leg thermoelectric module has undergone simulations to establish temperature conditions, open-circuit voltage, and power output generation; and secondly, these previous results are extrapolated for a larger thermoelectric module containing 28 pair-leg of N-P type material. The numerical study shows that a maximum value of electrical power of 60.70 mW was reached for 28-pair-leg N-P type thermocouples under a constant temperature difference of 20 K.

Application of Polyhedral Mesh for Vortex Formation Study for Simple Single Pump Sump

Meshing of domain in CFD is an important step to ensure accuracy of the solution. In the past, hexahedral or tetrahedral mesh systems were commonly used, and both have their merits and demerits. For large and complex geometry, polyhedral is another option but its accuracy is claimed to be lacking. In this paper, the use of polyhedral mesh system by past researchers are reviewed. Evaluation on the application of polyhedral mesh system for the study of the vortex formation with a simple single pump sump model is made. Validation was made through the comparison of the results from hexahedral, tetrahedral and polyhedral mesh sizes and the experimental data from published data. The polyhedral mesh system was found to perform satisfactorily and was able to match the results from the hexahedral mesh system as well as the experimental data.

CFD Analysis of Duct from APH Outlet to ESP Inlet

In generation, Most of the thermal power plant is installed ESP with Bag-house FF Filteration system. Electrostatic Precipitator (ESP) are well accepted and widely used for air pollution control due to reasonable collections efficiency, low pressure-drop, and low capital and operating costs. The performance of modern ESP’s would be expected to be better than 99.9% particulate removal efficiency while incurring less than 100 Pa pressure drop. The geometry of inlet duct has refined with guide vanes placed at several locations. An improvement of flow distribution in the duct through optimization can be achieved by modification of inlet duct. In this present work, CFD analysis of flow through the APH outlet to ESP inlet duct and ESP Outlet duct is performed by modification of duct , in order to reduce the pressure drop, reduce turbulence as well as achieve uniform distributions among the all streams and minimize erosion of duct walls caused due to high velocity. Reducing erosion of the duct walls results in the reduction of leakages in the ducts. Reduction of pressure drop across the duct saves the power consumption. The ESP inlet and ESP Outlet duct consists of two inlet and two outlets. The simulation studies involving the flow through the ESP inlet and outlet duct are performed using3-D Model development using Solid Works, ANSYS Design Modeler, Grid generation using ICEM CFD (HEXA) and Performing the simulation using ANSYS CFX using structured hexahedral mesh. The pathlines, velocity contours, pressure distributions for various cases involving without modification of duct. The ESP inlet duct and outlet duct modification shows lesser pressure drop with uniform distributions across the duct.

Multi-objective optimization design for a hydrodynamic retarder based on CFD simulation considering cavitation effect

It is important to suppress cavitation phenomenon for lower vibration and noise, which can be realized by structure optimization to reduce cavitation bubbles of flow field. Nonetheless, performance factors in hydrodynamic retarder are usually conflicted when conducting a structure design, it is hard to simultaneously restrain cavitation and improve the retarding performance. In our study, a combination of comprehensive CFD simulation and multi-objective optimization is developed to improve the retarding torque ([Formula: see text]), lessen the volume of Retarder ([Formula: see text]) and reduce the volume of bubbles ([Formula: see text]) in the internal flow field. First, the elaborate CFD simulation calculation, included a refined hexahedral mesh and the stress-blended eddy simulation (SBES), is proposed to investigate the unsteady flow field considering the cavitation, and its accuracy is validated by experimental data. Then, the RSM (Respond Surface Method) approximation model is constructed by combination of DOE (Design of Method) and CFD methods. The NSGA-II (Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm) is selected as multi-objective optimization algorithm, and the weight and scale factor of each sub objective are specified. The optimization results, verified by theoretical calculation, show that [Formula: see text] is increased by 22%–24%, [Formula: see text] is reduced by 32%–45% and [Formula: see text] is reduced by 1%. Furthermore, the comparison of the vortex distributions before and after optimization demonstrates that the optimization improves the flow field impact and pressure loss in the retarder and reduces the number of bubbles resulting in the increasing vortex. Additionally, parameters’ effect on the cavitation and the braking performance are analyzed to efficiently achieve the best comprehensive performance of the retarder design. The newly-developed optimization method, which can understand the optimization principle and guide a balance between the cavitation and the retarding performance improvement, will reduce huge trial cost and time cost in the manufacture.

Hexahedral Mesh Quality Improvement with Geometric Constraints

Hexahedral mesh is of great value in the analysis of mechanical structure, and the mesh quality has an important impact on the efficiency and accuracy of the analysis. This paper presents a quality improvement method for hexahedral meshes, which consists of node classification, geometric constraints based single hexahedron regularization and local hexahedral mesh stitching. The nodes are divided into different types and the corresponding geometric constraints are established in single hexahedron regularization to keep the geometric shapes of original mesh. In contrast to the global optimization strategies, we perform the hexahedral mesh stitching operation within a few local regions surrounding elements with undesired quality, which can effectively improve the quality of the mesh with less consuming time. A number of mesh quality improvements for hexahedral meshes generated by a variety of methods are introduced to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.