An adaptive-grid scheme is developed to resolve extremely large gradie
nts associated with an unsteady vortex-induced boundary-layer flow. Pr
evious investigations based on Eulerian descriptions have failed to re
solve the terminal structure of the flowfield due to the emergence of
a singularity at a finite time. The present approach is based on a mov
ing-grid method applied to the streamwise direction of the boundary la
yer. Grid movement is coupled to the flowfield in an autonomous manner
by an analytical weight function designed to improve the numerical st
ability and computational efficiency of the algorithm. The time and lo
cation of the singularity are successfully predicted in agreement with
previous published Lagrangian calculations and asymptotic analysis.