A gridfree scheme for simulation of natural convection in three dimensions

The gridfree vortex filament method (VFM) is extended to the treatment of three-dimensional flows including heat transfer and natural convection. A class of energy particles accounting for the temperature over and above the ambient are added to the vortex tubes in the VFM. Successful implementation of the algorithm requires advances in code acceleration via parallelization of computation, storage and load balancing, improvements to the specification of loop removal and the development of a least-square scheme for baroclinic generation of vortex tubes. Tests of the methodology are carried out for the rise of elliptically shaped heated regions due to natural convection and comparison to previous grid-based calculations.