Spectral difference method for compressible flow on unstructured grids with mixed elements

This paper presents the development of a 2D solver for inviscid and viscous compressible flows using the spectral difference (SD) method for unstructured grids with mixed elements. A mixed quadrilateral and triangular grid is first refined using one-level h-refinement to generate a quadrilateral grid while keeping the curvature of boundary edges. The SD method designed for quadrilateral meshes can subsequently be applied for the refined unstructured grid. Results obtained with the SD method for both inviscid and viscous compressible flows compare well with analytical solutions and other published results.