An H-Adaptive Finite Element Model for Environmental Transport Prediction

Authors

David B. Carrington, Los Alamos National LaboratoryFollow
Darrell Pepper, University of Nevada, Las VegasFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1998

Publication Title

Journal of Fluids Engineering-Transactions of the ASME

Volume

120

First page number:

406

Last page number:

407

Abstract

It is widely recognized that major pollution problems and potential hazardous consequences now exist worldwide. Such concerns have lead to increased efforts in pollution transport and diffusion modeling by many researchers (Pielke, 1984; Domenico and Schwartz, 1990).

A rapid h-adaptive finite element model has been developed to calculate 2- and 3-D environmental fluid flow and species transport. The model runs on enhanced PCs, SGI workstations, and Cray class supercomputers.

The employment of adapting, unstructured meshes permits one to accurately solve large problems with a reduced number of nodal points. This is accomplished by concentrating (refining) nodes in those regions where most of the activity takes place, and unrefining in regions where solutions are smooth. However, the key to successful implementation of adaptive mesh techniques is in the choice of element type, handling of interface transitions, and rapid mesh refinement and unrefinement operations during the transient solution. Adaptive techniques are currently being used to simulate a wide range of complex flows, e.g., groundwater transport in porous media (Pepper and Stephenson, 1995), atmospheric transport over complex terrain (Pepper and Carrington, 1995), and compressible flows with shock capture (Devloo et al., 1988).

Keywords

Computer simulation; Fluid flow; Pollution

Disciplines

Engineering | Environmental Engineering | Environmental Sciences | Mechanical Engineering | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Language

English

Permissions

Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the item. Publisher policy does not allow archiving the final published version. If a post-print (author's peer-reviewed manuscript) is allowed and available, or publisher policy changes, the item will be deposited.

Repository Citation

Carrington, D. B., Pepper, D. (1998). An H-Adaptive Finite Element Model for Environmental Transport Prediction. Journal of Fluids Engineering-Transactions of the ASME, 120 406-407.