The near-body portion of a domain is defined to include the surface geometry of all bodies being considered and the volume of space extending a short distance away from the respective surfaces. This is a reasonable constraint since near- body grids are only required to extend a short distance away from body surfaces. However, in the future, if the need exists, a method of adaptive refinement within near- body grids will also be developed. The off- body domain is filled with overlapping uniform Cartesian grids of variable levels of refinement.
All adaptive refinement takes place within the off-body component grids.
However, during the solution process, the off-body field is marked for refinement level based on estimates of solution error. Accordingly, at any time during the simulation, the off-body field is discretized with a set of overlapping uniform Cartesian grid systems of varying levels of refinement. Consider an example using the X-38 vehicle. Initial off-body grids. Solution Error .