27.1 Using Adaption

Two significant advantages of the unstructured mesh capability in ANSYS FLUENT are:

• Reduced setup time compared to structured meshes.

• Ability to incorporate solution-adaptive refinement of the mesh.

By using solution-adaptive refinement, you can add cells where they are needed in the mesh, thus enabling the features of the flow field to be better resolved. When adaption is used properly, the resulting mesh is optimal for the flow solution because the solution is used to determine where more cells need to be added. Thus, computational resources are not wasted by the inclusion of unnecessary cells, as it occurs in the structured mesh approach. Also, the effect of mesh refinement on the solution can be studied without completely regenerating the mesh.

Note:   When you perform mesh adaption in a parallel computation, a load balancing step will be performed by ANSYS FLUENT by default.

The automatic load balancing will not occur in conjunction with dynamic adaption. See Section  27.4 for information on dynamic adaption, and Section  32.5.5 for information on load balancing in parallel ANSYS FLUENT. For information about the static adaption process, see this section in the separate Theory Guide.