An Adaptive Mesh Strategy for Transient Flows and Heat Transfer Simulations

An adaptive mesh strategy for the numerical simulation of incompressible transient flows with heat transfer and mass transport is presented in this work. The Finite Element technique, with unstructured meshes formed by tetrahedral elements, and the two-step Taylor-Galerkin method are used. The velocity field is obtained by an explicit scheme, while pressure field is computed by an implicit scheme using a pre-conditioned conjugate gradient method. Error indicators, an adaptation criterion, a refinement scheme, a smoothing process and an appropriate data structure are used to obtain a suitable mesh in order to get accurate results. To evaluate the adaptive mesh strategy performance, two numerical applications involving transient incompressible viscous fluid flows with heat transfer and mass transport, taking into account relevant error indicator, are presented.