A new grid deformation technology with high quality and robustness based on quaternion

Quality and robustness of grid deformation is of the most importance in the field of aircraft design, and grid in high quality is essential for improving the precision of numerical simulation. In order to maintain the orthogonality of deformed grid, the displacement of grid points is divided into rotational and translational parts in this paper, and inverse distance weighted interpolation is used to transfer the changing location from boundary grid to the spatial grid. Moreover, the deformation of rotational part is implemented in combination with the exponential space mapping that improves the certainty and stability of quaternion interpolation. Furthermore, the new grid deformation technique named “layering blend deformation” is built based on the basic quaternion technique, which combines the layering arithmetic with transfinite interpolation (TFI) technique. Then the proposed technique is applied in the movement of airfoil, parametric modeling, and the deformation of complex configuration, in which the robustness of grid quality is tested. The results show that the new method has the capacity to deal with the problems with large deformation, and the “layering blend deformation” improves the efficiency and quality of the basic quaternion deformation method significantly.