Events Calendar

An Adaptive Cut-Cell Method for Environmental Fluid Mechanics

Speaker:
Dr. Michael F. Barad, P.E.,
Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, barad@stanford.edu Abstract:
I will present our block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) computational fluid dynamics model and its application to the study of highly nonlinear multiscale environmen¬tal flows. AMR allows researchers to "zoom in" on important flow features by dynamically tracking them with recursively nested finer grids. For example, this permits the accurate multiscale simulation of oceanic internal gravity waves, including generation at the meter scale, propagation and interaction over tens of kilometers, and sub-meter scale shear insta¬bility induced decay, all in the same calculation. The method is capable of simulating a wide range of flows in environmental fluid mechanics, including flows in lakes, rivers, wetlands, and the coastal ocean. The method is also capable of studying flows in bioreactors and other complex fluid systems, potential avenues for fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations.
The model is based on the solution of the variable density, incompressible, Navier-Stokes equations in two or three dimensions, including air/water and fluid/solid interfaces and the transport of scalars. It is composed of a second-order accurate, finite-volume projection method, which includes a slope limited Godunov discretization of the advective terms. We discretize irregular domains as a collection of (cut-cell) control volumes formed by the intersection of the domain with Cartesian grid cells. The control volumes naturally fit within parallelizable block data structures, and permit dynamic AMR coarsening and refinement of arbitrarily complex domains as a simulation progresses. This methodology is combined with finite-volume AMR discretizations based on two-way flux matching at refinement boundaries to obtain a conservative method that is second-order accurate in solution error.

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes