Parallel Block-structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement for Incompressible Navier-stokes Equations

The numerical simulation of fluid flow involving complex geometries is greatly limited by the spatial grid resolution required. These flows often contain small regions with complex motions, while the remaining flow is relatively smooth. Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) enables the spatial grid to be refined in local regions that require finer grids to resolve the flow. This work describes an approach to parallelization of a structured adaptive mesh refinement (SAMR) algorithm. This type of methodology is based on locally refined grids superimposed on coarser grids to achieve the desired resolution in numerical simulations. The main elements to achieve parallelization of SAMR algorithms are a dynamic load-balancing method to distribute work to processors and a dynamic distribution technique to manage communications. The methodology is based on a message passing model using the recursive coordinate bisection (RCB) for domain partition. For this work, a semi-implicit projection method has been implemented to solve the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations.