A new method for creating sparse design velocity fields Original Research Article

We present a novel method for the computation of mesh node sensitivities with respect to the boundary node movement. The sensitivity field is sparse in a sense that movement of each boundary node affects only given amount of inner mesh nodes, which can result in considerable savings in the storage space. The method needs minimal control from the user, and it does not place any restrictions (such as block structure) on the mesh. Use of the method is demonstrated with a shape optimization problem using CAD-free parametrization. A solution to the classical die-swell free boundary problem by coupling the boundary node locations with the state variables is also presented. In that case, sparsity of the sensitivity field directly affects the sparsity of the Jacobian of the residual and results in significant savings in the computation time.