Automatic Structured Mesh Generation Method for Airfoil Configuration Based on Parametric Multi-Block Topology

This paper reports on a fully automatic structured Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) mesh generation method based on a parametric multi-block topology for airfoil configurations. The method parameterizes the control vertices and the control edges, which construct the multi-block topology, and then assembles blocks with the control edges. Once the airfoil shape is determined, the topology is immediately updated based on the parameterization, and the CFD mesh of the airfoil is generated using transfinite interpolation. The present method is tested on airfoils with different topologies, shapes, and mesh sizes to check its robustness, efficiency, and quality. The test results show that the mesh of an airfoil of any shape can be generated automatically with high quality. In addition, an airfoil CFD mesh with about 50 million nodes can be automatically generated in less than ten seconds on a laptop, and the Jacobi of over 97% of the mesh cells is larger than 0.9. The flow simulation results for the NACA0012 airfoil agree well with the wind-tunnel test data, demonstrating the method’s applicability to CFD.