Preventing spurious artifacts with consistent interpolation of properties between cell centers and vertices in two-dimensional rectilinear grids

Lopes A. A. O., Nascimento F. P., Pinillos F. I., Santos T. L., Júnior A. B., Lavorante L. P. - CILAMCE 2019 – XL Ibero-Latin American Congress on Computational Methods in Engineering. 2019.

The finite element method (FEM) has been an essential tool in computational structural dynamics (CSD) as much as the finite volume method (FVM) has been in the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). These numerical methods and many other scientific applications (such as sedimentary process simulations, reservoir modelling, digital terrains) rely on cell-centered (CC) or cell-vertex (CV) meshes. For two-dimensional meshes, it is rather simple to interpolate property values from CV to CC maintaining local property coherence and continuity. However, the opposite is not valid. When applying the same interpolation approach on properties from CC to CV, spurious artifacts may emerge due to the topologically independent characteristic of the interpolation. In this study, we discuss how to interpolate property values from CC to CV for two-dimensional rectilinear grids and present an algorithm which produces property value distributions that are numerically exact, locally coherent and smooth.

Palavras-chave

interpolation, rectilinear grids, artifact prevention, value projection