Adaptive Finite Element Method for Wind Engineering Problems

The computational wind engineering problems such as flow around bridges is computationally expensive. For these unsteady computations, adaptive finite element technique may reduce the computer time and storage while keeping a desired accuracy. In this paper, the p-version as well as the h-version adaptive finite element techniques are implemented into the computational wind flow respectively. In these techniques, the error distribution of vorticity is first estimated. Then, the finite element grid and the order of interpolation polynomials are, respectively, changed continuously for h-version and p-version methods in accordance with the change of the error distribution. One through four levels of h-refinement and the 2nd through 5th orders of polynomial are considered for the two versions of adaptive techniques respectively. Unequal orders of interpolations are used for the velocity and pressure. A numerical simulation, the flow around a circular cylinder with Reynolds number of 1000, is also included. The computed results are in good agreement with other reported ones. The h-version works very well if it is started with an equal spacing mesh at this time.