Effect of Mesh Refinement Methods on Hypersonic Flow Quantities

Mesh quality and resolution are vital to accurately capture flow phenomena in CFD simulations. This paper investigates the effect of mesh refinement on the accuracy of hypersonic flow quantities using a novel topology-based mesh generation software. This software offers unique capabilities for tailored mesh adaptation based on user-defined refinement criteria. These automatically generated refinement patterns improve the overall alignment with flow features while creating nearly isotropic cells throughout the domain. The refinement patterns offer hanging node, diamond, and wedge cells for transitions, making the software useful for various physics solvers and applications. Comparisons of flow surface quantities for laminar and turbulent solutions for a generic spherical forebody to the other refinement patterns and existing literature are made using a baseline structured mesh and several unstructured meshes with differing refinement patterns. The impact of these meshing techniques on the flow solution is discussed.