Adaptive Cartesian Mesh Generation

The last decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in Cartesian mesh methods for CFD. In contrast to body-fitted structured or unstructured methods, Cartesian grids are inherently non-body-fitted; i.e. the volume mesh structure is independent of the surface discretization and topology. This characteristic promotes extensive automation, dramatically eases the burden of surface preparation, and greatly simplifies the re-analysis processes when the topology of a configuration changes. By taking advantage of these important characteristics, well-designed Cartesian approaches virtually eliminate the difficulty of grid generation for complex configurations. Typically, meshes with millions of cells can be generated in minutes on moderately powerful workstations.