Application of Beltrami equations to generation of spatial adaptive grids

Abstract Many physical phenomena involve rapid formation, propagation, and disintegration of small-scale structures, such as shock waves in compressible flows, shear layers in laminar and turbulent flows, phase boundaries in nonequilibrim and boundary and interior layers, tearing layers and magnetic reconnection regions in magnetically confined plasmas, etc. A promising tool to deal with numerical problems related to these structures is adaptive grid generation technology. With the increasing complexity of the physical problem, there is an increasing need for comprehensive methods which enable one to generate suitable adaptive meshes in a uniform ‘black box’ mode, with or without human interaction. This paper describes one of such comprehensive grid generation methods that relies on the variational and elliptic approaches to the generation of grids on hypersurfaces. The method enables one to generate both fixed and adaptive grids in domains and on surfaces with a complicated geometry and/or a complex physical solution.