Adaptive Mesh Refinement in Viscous Flow Solvers - Refinement in the Near-wall Region, Implementation and Verification

MARIN's viscous flow code ReFRESCO is used in a daily routine to analyze the flow around offshore constructions, ships and propellers. ReFRESCO is able to solve the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations for multi-phase unsteady incompressible flow. Several one- and two-equation eddy-viscosity turbulence models and cavitation models are available. The code is based on a finite-volume method with cell-centred, colocated variables. The code is face based and cells with arbitrary number of faces are allowed. The free surface is solved using an interface-capturing method. This paper focuses on the implementation of an adaptive mesh refinement method in ReFRESCO. The current work is inspired by previous work done by Wackers et al. and is part of the Streamline project, partly funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. Windt and Klaij demonstrated ReFRESCO’s adaptive mesh refinement capability, which is in development, for two kinds of flows using two different criteria for refinement. Here, we focus on one specific aspect, the refinement close to walls, i.e. inside the boundary layer. In the next section we will discuss this, followed by a section that describes the testing programme of the implemented method. Next results are presented. The paper ends with conclusions.