Within an industrial setting, mesh adaptation has so far found very limited use. This is, in part, due to the complexity of the geometries and flow features that are to be dealt with. However, the successful utilisation of grid modification techniques, could help engineers achieve more accurate estimates of quantities of interest quickly and efficiently. For this reason, in this paper, adjoint error mesh adaptation technology is developed and applied to steady-3D turbo-machinery solutions.
The grid modification strategy proposed comprises of a combined mesh movement and mesh refinement procedure, entirely based on errors related to the functional of interest. The node addition scheme makes use of the output to the flow adjoint solver and an interpolation to an embedded grid. The determined error is used in an edge-refinement approach developed in the in-house MeshPost software. The mesh relocation technique, instead, employs the sensitivity of the functional of interest with respect to the nodes’ coordinates to compute a Riemmannian metric. This parameter is then equi-distributed over the mesh by applying a spring-stiffness approach.