Three-Dimensional Hybrid Mesh Generation for Turbomachinery Airfoils

A methodology is developed for generating three-dimensional hybrid meshes for turbomachinery airfoils. This method creates a volume mesh by stacking layers of area meshes along the blade span-wise direction. The area meshes are hybrid meshes composed of a structured O-grid around the airfoil and an unstructured grid in the rest of the domain. Each layer of the stacked mesh is mapped from a single 'source' mesh. Optimization based smoothing is applied to the mapped area mesh to increase mesh quality. The optimization based smoothing is also applied to the periodic boundaries to optimize the placement of the grid points on the periodic boundary. Further enhancement of grid quality was obtained by edge swapping and node insertion. Edge swapping reduced the dependency of mesh quality on the choice of the source mesh. The meshing algorithm is tested on a challenging turbine rotor airfoil whose stagger angle varies approximately 88 degree from hub to tip. 2001 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.

Three-Dimensional Hybrid Mesh Generation for Turbomachinery Airfoils Conference Paper