Verification of Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation for Turbulent Simulations over ONERA M6 Wing

Unstructured anisotropic mesh adaptation is known to be an efficient way to control discretization errors in computational fluid dynamics simulations. Method verification is required to provide the confidence for routine use in production analysis. The current work aims at verification of anisotropic mesh adaptation for Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes simulations over the ONERA M6 wing. The present verification study is performed using four different flow solvers, three different implementations of the metric field, and three mesh mechanics packages. Two of the flow solvers use stabilized finite element discretizations (FUN3D-SFE and general geometry Navier–Stokes), one uses finite volume discretization (FUN3D-FV), and the last one uses mixed finite volume and finite element discretizations (Wolf). The mesh adaptation is based on an error estimator that aims to control the quadratic error term in the linear interpolation of the Mach number. Two sets of adaptations were performed; the first one controls the interpolation error in the L2 norm, and the second one controls the interpolation error in the L4 norm. Convergence studies were performed on the forces and the pitching moment using all four solvers, and the results are compared with previously verified convergence studies on fixed (nonadapted) meshes. Both the forces and pitching moment on adapted meshes are found to be converging to the fine-mesh values faster than those on fixed meshes. In addition to forces and moments, the convergence of surface pressure and skin-friction coefficients at various measurement locations on the wing are also presented. Adapted-mesh surface pressure distributions agree with the fine fixed mesh pressure distributions. Adapted-mesh skin-friction distributions contain high-frequency noise with mean values approaching the fixed mesh pressure skin-friction distributions.