ADAPTIVE FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF INCOM PRESSIBLE VISCOUS-FLOW USING POSTERIORI ERROR ESTIMATION AND CONTROL OF NODE DENSITY DISTRIBUTION

The adaptive finite element method based on an 'a posteriori error est imation' is known to be a powerful technique for analyzing the enginee ring practical problems, since it excludes the instinctive aspect of t he mesh subdivision and gives high accuracy with relatively low comput ational cost. In the adaptive procedure, both the error estimation and the mesh generation according to the error estimator are essential. I n this paper, the adaptive procedure is realized by the automatic mesh generation based on the control of node density distribution, which i s decided according to the error estimator. The global percentage erro r, CPU time, the degrees of freedom and the accuracy of the solution o f the adaptive procedure are compared with those of the conventional m ethod using regular meshes. Such numerical examples as the driven cavi ty flows of various Reynolds numbers and the flows around a cylinder h ave shown the very high performance of the proposed adaptive procedure .