Efficient Mesh Deformation Using Radial Basis Functions on Unstructured Meshes
An efficient mesh-deformation algorithm has been developed within an unstructured-grid computational-fluid-dynamics solver framework based on a radial-basis-function volume-interpolation method. The data-transfer problem between fluid and structural solvers is simplified here using a beam structural representation, with surface mesh deformation given directly via translational and rotational deformations. The volume mesh deformation is then performed using a radial-basis-function method, which requires no mesh-connectivity information and allows straightforward implementation in an unstructured computational-fluid-dynamics solver in a parallel fashion. However, the pure method is impractical for large meshes, and a novel “greedy” data-reduction algorithm is presented here to select an optimum reduced set of surface mesh points, which makes the mesh-deformation method extremely efficient. Several two- and three-dimensional test cases are presented to validate the algorithm performance, including a realisti...