Adaptive refinement/recovery for analysis of wind around structure

For the efficient finite-element wind analysis, using the optimal mesh is o ne of the most important factors. The optimal mesh can be obtained when the errors of the solution are distributed uniformly over the entire domain. T he study presents the development of a transition element for flow analysis , an element that has a variable number of midside nodes and can be effecti vely used in the adaptive mesh refinement by connecting the locally refined mesh to the existing coarse mesh through a minimum mesh modification. In t he dynamic analysis of flow, the optimal mesh should be changed continuousl y in accordance with the changing error distribution; the proposed refineme nt/recovery scheme was found to be very effective for this purpose. The mod ified superconvergent patch recovery for the variable-node element is prese nted to estimate a posteriori error of the solution for the adaptive mesh r efinement. The boundary conditions of the nodes generated by refinement pro cess are different from those used in the ordinary finite-element method, i n order to describe the singular point correctly. The numerical examples sh ow that the optimal mesh for the finite-element analysis of flow around the structures can be obtained automatically by the proposed scheme.