A method for particle location and field interpolation on complex, three-dimensional computational meshes

Abstract

A method for locating particles within arbitrary three-dimensional computational meshes is described. It is based on an iterative procedure which uses transformed coordinates defined by iso-parametric functions. The method also enables one to interpolate field values from the mesh nodes to the particle position. Example applications demonstrate how effective the method is. For very distorted computational cells special practices have to be introduced in order to keep the number of iterations to a minimum.