[maybee]

In CFD when discretizing the geometry three approaches are the finite difference method, finite element method and the finite volume method.


Can all these approaches use structured as well as unstructured mesh?

greetings
maybee

[Alex C.]

Strictly speaking, the 2 mesh type (structured and unstructured) can be applied to the 3 solving method (FD, FVM, FEM) by the difficulty will not be the same depending on the method.

Finite difference will be much harder to use with unstructured mesh than it is for structured mesh. The main advantage of finite difference over the other solvers are the simplicity of implementing high-order scheme. In order to use unstructured mesh with finite-difference, one would need to build a spatial interpolation that leads to the orthogonality requirement of Taylor expansion. Combining spatial interpolation with high-order discretization seems to be a real challenge.

In my opinion, the difficulty of finite volume and finite element is mostly the same with structured and unstructured mesh.