AIAA 2001-2659 A Grid Adaptive Methodology for Functional Outputs of Compressible Flow Simulations

This paper presents an error estimation and grid adaptive strategy for estimating and reducing simulation errors in integral outputs (functionals) of partial differential equations. Adaptive criteria are derived using an adjoint-based error correction technique that relates the local residual errors of both the primal and adjoint solutions to the global error in the prescribed functional. This relationship allows local error contributions to be used as indicators in a grid adaptive strategy designed to produce specially tuned grids for accurately estimating the chosen functional. In this paper, the error estimation and grid adaptive strategy is applied to subsonic and supersonic inviscid test cases involving complex airfoil configurations. The proposed output-based scheme is compared with a commonly used gradient-based adaptive method. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed adaptive procedure compares favorably in terms of accuracy and robustness relative to the gradient-based method. Finally, the error correction technique is applied to a simple NavierStokes test case yielding super convergent drag estimates after correction.

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