Field conserving adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) scheme on massively parallel adaptive octree meshes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Saurabh, Kumar, Khanwale, Makrand A., Ishii, Masado, Sundar, Hari, Ganapathysubramanian, Baskar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Saurabh, Kumar
Khanwale, Makrand A.
Ishii, Masado
Sundar, Hari
Ganapathysubramanian, Baskar
author_facet Saurabh, Kumar
Khanwale, Makrand A.
Ishii, Masado
Sundar, Hari
Ganapathysubramanian, Baskar
contents Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is widely used to efficiently resolve localized features in time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) by selectively refining and coarsening the mesh. However, in long-horizon simulations, repeated intergrid interpolations can introduce systematic drift in conserved quantities, especially for variational discretizations with continuous basis functions. While interpolation from parent-to-child during refinement in continuous Galerkin (CG) discretizations is naturally conservative, the standard injection-based child-to-parent coarsening interpolation is generally not. We propose a simple, scalable field-conserving coarsening operator for parallel, octree-based AMR. The method enforces discrete global conservation during coarsening by first computing field conserving coarse-element values at quadrature points and then recovering coarse nodal degrees of freedom via an $L^2$ projection (mass-matrix solve), which simultaneously controls the $L_2$ error. We evaluate the approach on mass-conserving phase-field models, including the Cahn--Hilliard and Cahn--Hilliard--Navier--Stokes systems, and compare against injection in terms of conservation error, solution quality, and computational cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07817
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Field conserving adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) scheme on massively parallel adaptive octree meshes
Saurabh, Kumar
Khanwale, Makrand A.
Ishii, Masado
Sundar, Hari
Ganapathysubramanian, Baskar
Numerical Analysis
Mathematical Physics
Computational Physics
Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is widely used to efficiently resolve localized features in time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) by selectively refining and coarsening the mesh. However, in long-horizon simulations, repeated intergrid interpolations can introduce systematic drift in conserved quantities, especially for variational discretizations with continuous basis functions. While interpolation from parent-to-child during refinement in continuous Galerkin (CG) discretizations is naturally conservative, the standard injection-based child-to-parent coarsening interpolation is generally not. We propose a simple, scalable field-conserving coarsening operator for parallel, octree-based AMR. The method enforces discrete global conservation during coarsening by first computing field conserving coarse-element values at quadrature points and then recovering coarse nodal degrees of freedom via an $L^2$ projection (mass-matrix solve), which simultaneously controls the $L_2$ error. We evaluate the approach on mass-conserving phase-field models, including the Cahn--Hilliard and Cahn--Hilliard--Navier--Stokes systems, and compare against injection in terms of conservation error, solution quality, and computational cost.
title Field conserving adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) scheme on massively parallel adaptive octree meshes
topic Numerical Analysis
Mathematical Physics
Computational Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07817