Mesh refinement

In numerical analysis, adaptive mesh refinement, or AMR, is a method of adapting the accuracy of a solution within certain sensitive or turbulent regions of simulation, dynamically and during the time the solution is being calculated. When solutions are calculated numerically, they are often limited to pre-determined quantified grids as in the Cartesian plane which constitute the computational grid, or 'mesh'. Many problems in numerical analysis, however, do not require a uniform precision in the numerical grids used for graph plotting or computational simulation, and would be better suited if specific areas of graphs which needed precision could be refined in quantification only in the regions requiring the added precision. Adaptive mesh refinement provides such a dynamic programming environment for adapting the precision of the numerical computation based on the requirements of a computation problem in specific areas of multi-dimensional graphs which need precision while leaving the other regions of the multi-dimensional graphs at lower levels of precision and resolution.

This dynamic technique of adapting computation precision to specific requirements has been accredited to Marsha Berger, Joseph Oliger, and Phillip Colella who developed an algorithm for dynamic gridding called local adaptive mesh refinement. The use of AMR has since then proved of broad use and has been used in studying turbulence problems in hydrodynamics as well as in the study of large scale structures in astrophysics as in the Bolshoi Cosmological Simulation.

In a series of papers, Marsha Berger, Joseph Oliger, and Phillip Colella developed an algorithm for dynamic gridding called local adaptive mesh refinement. The algorithm begins with the entire computational domain covered with a coarsely resolved base-level regular Cartesian grid. As the calculation progresses, individual grid cells are tagged for refinement, using a criterion that can either be user-supplied (for example mass per cell remains constant, hence higher density regions are more highly resolved) or based on Richardson extrapolation.

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