Discussion Forum

Hello,

I am trying to model a 3D scenario in which a cube is placed within a channel and is experiencing a crossflow while the cube is rotating. I am rotating the cube by encapsulating it within a rotating ellipsoid region and using the ale moving mesh interface. I am attaching a visual of the model at a certain point in time of the simulation. On the macro level, I am not detecting any issues with the results but when I zoom in close to the boundary between the rotating ellipsoid domain and the surrounding stationary flow field domain (picture attached), there seem to be discontinuities (mesh gaps and overlapping points) as the mesh moves. This may be skewing the results locally and I am not sure how that is affecting the results on a macro-scale.

Ideally, I would like to have some sort of dynamic mesh refinement at this interface that would adjust the flow field mesh to fill in those voids, and I looked into automatic meshing and adaptive meshing, but I am not sure how it could apply to my situation. I am not sure if the mesh elements are being distorted, but rather they are not adjusting to fill the voids. The best thing I have had some success with is increasing the mesh density at this interface so that the element size is very small and therefore as the rotating domain slides at the interface, the gaps are small.

If anyone has any suggestions for how to improve the model and avoid this issue, that would be great. I am stuck at this point.