Adaptive Refinement Tools for Tetrahedral Unstructured Grids

NASA’s Langley Research Center engineers have developed a new software package for more facile computational fluid dynamics. The software’s fast user run time, robustness, and efficiency have enabled its extensive use in space shuttle modeling. Adaptive Refinement Tool (ART) permits the computational modeling of flow, including jet or rocket plumes, wakes, and shocks via unstructured tetrahedral grids. Commercially available software packages often struggle to sufficiently and quickly model such complex examples of flow. ART also allows cells to be divided into two, four, or eight cells as compared to traditional software, which allows cell division only in units of eight. This is advantageous as it allows the user to control cell division more succinctly. ART executes commands via colloquial English, and has built-in internal statistical programming that increases its ease of use. ART allows the user the choice of alternate variables such as temperature or pressure at will, which facilitates modeling unusual or unlikely occurrences.