Adaptive p-finite element for wind enigneering

An important goal of computational wind engineering is to impact the design process withrnsimulations of flow around buildings and bridges. One challenging aspect of this goal is to solve thernNavier-Stokes (NS) equations accurately. For the unsteady computations, an adaptive finite element techniquernmay reduce the computer time and storage. The preliminary application of a p-version as well as an h-versionrnadaptive technique to computational wind engineering has been reported in previous paper. Therndetails on the implementation of p-adaptive technique will be discussed in this paper. In this technique,rntwo posteriori error estimations, which are based on the velocity and vorticity, are first presented. Then,rnthe polynomial order of the interpolation function is increased continuously element by element until thernestimated error is less than the accepted. The second through sixth orders of hierarchical functions arernused as the interpolation polynomials. Unequal order interpolations are used for velocity and pressure.rnUsing the flow around a circular cylinder with Reynolds number of 1000 the two error estimators arerncompared. The result show that the estimated error based on the velocity is lower than that based onrnthe vorticity.