Airfoil streamline tracking for advancing front meshing in two dimensions

In a typical computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workflow, the meshing process, during which a flow domain is discretized, influences the cost, accuracy, and efficiency of the subsequent CFD solution. For this reason, it is valuable to develop tools that produce meshes that are well-suited to the problems they represent. Schemes have been developed to refine and adapt meshes based on solution metrics. While these schemes are effective, they are relatively costly as the mesh and solution progress simultaneously. We have developed a meshing method that emulates the results of these adaptation schemes for a subset of cases. For subsonic flows around airfoils, certain adaptive schemes concentrate vertices around the stagnation streamline, the trailing edge streamline, and in the boundary layer region. We use an advancing front mesh generator that incorporates streamline location data to generate a mesh that concentrates vertices in the same locations favored by adjoint-based adaptive schemes. Streamline data is collected from inviscid solutions and is used to generate a mesh for the turbulent problem. We discuss the existing advancing front meshing scheme and the modifications made to produce meshes that incorporate stagnation and trailing edge streamlines. Results show that the meshing method that we have implemented offers improved accuracy for a given amount of computing time. We also show that we can generate meshes comparable in accuracy to meshes produced by mesh adaptation iterations. Finally, we examine the differences in streamline location between inviscid and turbulent cases. We find that the difference is small and does not limit the effectiveness of the scheme.