Computer-aided block-structuring through the use of optimization and expert system techniques

One of the most labor-intensive aspects of performing computational simulations of the flow over aerospace configurations is the design and generation of appropriate computational grids, especially of the block-structured variety. A major difficulty with current systems is the need to design a suitable blocking plan, or flowfield decomposition, for a given configuration. Presented herein is a new approach for the automatic design of suitable blocking plans which is based upon the use of a rule-based expert system. A domain decomposition knowledge base is used by the expert system to analyze a given configuration, set up an appropriate baseline blocking plan, and perform a nonlinear integer optimization to “fine-tune” the blocking plan and the resulting computational grid. It is shown that this new approach efficiently generates near-optimal block-structured grids over a variety of multi-body configurations.