Computability and Adaptivity in CFD

Abstract

We give a brief introduction to research on adaptive computational methods for laminar compressible and incompressible flow, and then focus on computability and adaptivity for turbulent incompressible flow, where we present a framework for adaptive finite element methods with duality- based a posteriori error control for chosen output quantities of interest. We show in concrete examples that outputs such as mean values in time of drag and lift of a bluff body in a turbulent flow are computable to a tolerance of a few percent, for a simple geometry using some hundred thousand mesh points, and for complex geometries some million mesh points.