A Moving Embedded Boundary Approach For The Compressible Navier-Stokes Equations In A Block-Structured Adaptive Refinement Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel embedded boundary method within an adaptive mesh framework for simulating compressible flows with moving boundaries, validated through diverse test cases showing high accuracy and conservation.

Contribution

It develops a conservative, ghost-cell based embedded boundary approach integrated with adaptive refinement for accurate, efficient compressible flow simulations involving moving boundaries.

Findings

The method accurately captures shock and flow features in various test cases.

Mass conservation improves with mesh refinement, demonstrating algorithm's robustness.

Good agreement with analytical, experimental, and numerical results in literature.

Abstract

A computational technique has been developed to perform compressible flow simulations involving moving boundaries using an embedded boundary approach within the block-structured adaptive mesh refinement framework of AMReX. A conservative, unsplit, cut-cell approach is utilized and a ghost-cell approach is developed for computing the flux on the moving, embedded boundary faces. Various test cases are performed to validate the method, and compared with analytical, experimental, and other numerical results in literature. Inviscid and viscous test cases are performed that span a wide regime of flow speeds $-$ acoustic (harmonically pulsating sphere), smooth flows (expansion fan created by a receding piston) and flows with shocks (shock-cylinder interaction, shock-wedge interaction, pitching NACA 0012 airfoil and shock-cone interaction). A closed system with moving boundaries $-$ an oscillating piston in a cylinder, showed that the percentage error in mass within the system decreases with refinement, demonstrating the conservative nature of the moving boundary algorithm. Viscous test cases involve that of a horizontally moving cylinder at $Re=40$, an inline oscillating cylinder at $Re=100$, and a transversely oscillating cylinder at $Re=185$. The judicious use of adaptive mesh refinement with appropriate refinement criteria to capture the regions of interest leads to well-resolved flow features, and good quantitative comparison is observed with the results available in literature.