Unstructured Mesh Motion Using Sliding Cells and Mapping Domains

This paper addresses the problem of generating unstructured meshes with fixed connectivity for large rigid body motion. The proposed approach consists in generating a mesh in computational space for a generic configuration of the moving body. The management of body and mesh motion is then carried out in computational space using a sliding mesh paradigm. Afterwards, the mesh in physical space is obtained through the Winslow equation to map the computational mesh to the physical space. Two new discritization techniques are implemented, validated and compared for performing the Winslow operator on unstructured grids. The first approach used a 9-point Cartesian stencil inside each patch of the computational mesh and discritizes the mapping operators on that using conventional finite difference schemes. The second approach used finite volume discritization technique by linearizing the system of mapping equations. This methodology is applied to complex geometric configurations representative of engineering applications.