Browsing by Browse by FOR 2008 "010207 Theoretical and Applied Mechanics"

Contour dynamics and contour-advective methods are commonly used numerical techniques for simulating inviscid fluid motions. In these methods the vorticity or potential vorticity of a flow is represented by a series of contours which are advected according to the prevailing velocity field. In some circumstances the contours may cross, eroding the accuracy of the numerical solution and violating the equations of motion. This paper describes an automated method for explicitly revealing such crossings, first considering the case of determining if two contours cross and then later the more general case of determining if and where an arbitrary number of contours cross.

This is the first of two papers devoted to the analysis of contour crossing errors that occur in contour-advective simulations of fluid motion. Here an algorithm is presented for quantifying the error due to contour crossings. The first step is to determine the relative proximity of all possible pairs of contours. A digital representation of each contour is produced to aid in the corresponding calculation. Simple analysis of functions is then used to find any crossings between contours deemed close to each other by the digital representation method. Next, the area in error of a pair of crossing contours is calculated by identifying the polygon or polygons that approximately bound the erroneous region. Finally, some preliminary results of analysis of contour crossings that occur in contour-advective semilagrangian (CASL) simulations of single layer quasigeostrophic turbulence are presented. It is shown that the error due to contour crossings is small in the simulations considered here.

This is the second of two papers devoted to the analysis of contour crossing errors that occur in contour-advective simulations of fluid motion, where either vorticity or potential vorticity is represented by contours. We begin with a detailed discussion on some of the potential mechanisms for contour crossing. Past work has suggested that the formation of contour crossings is due to inadequate spatial resolution of contours [1]. The implementation of two schemes for preventing contour crossings within the framework of the Contour-Advective Semi-Lagrangian (CASL) algorithm is detailed here. We then present an analysis of contour crossing errors in simulations of quasigeostrophic turbulence on the f-plane and the quasigeostrophic motion of an initially circular vortex patch on the b-plane using the algorithm detailed in Part 1. We find that in general individual crossings occur at scales smaller than the inversion grid scale on which velocity is calculated, but at scales larger than that of the surgical scale that defines the smallest resolved features (vorticity) of a flow. If the resolution of a quasigeostrophic turbulence simulation on the f-plane is increased by doubling the number of grid points in each coordinate direction used in the calculation of the velocity field, then the total area in error due to contour crossings remains unchanged; a smaller number of crossings introducing larger scale area errors is replaced by a greater number of smaller local errors. Uniformly increasing the density of nodes along all contours and placement of nodes at points of close approach on contours are both effective methods for limiting contour crossings.