The ability to treat arbitrary boundary shapes is one of the most desirable characteristics of a method for generating grids, including those about airfoils. In a grid used for computing aerodynamic flow over an airfoil, or any other body shape, the surface of the body is usually treated as an inner boundary and often cannot be easily represented as an analytic function. The GRAPE computer program was developed to incorporate a method for generating two-dimensional finite-difference grids about airfoils and other shapes by the use of the Poisson differential equation. GRAPE can be used with any boundary shape, even one specified by tabulated points and including a limited number of sharp corners. The GRAPE program has been developed to be numerically stable and computationally fast. GRAPE can provide the aerodynamic analyst with an efficient and consistent means of grid generation.
The GRAPE procedure generates a grid between an inner and an outer boundary by utilizing an iterative procedure to solve the Poisson differential equation subject to geometrical restraints. In this method, the inhomogeneous terms of the equation are automatically chosen such that two important effects are imposed on the grid. The first effect is control of the spacing between mesh points along mesh lines intersecting the boundaries. The second effect is control of the angles with which mesh lines intersect the boundaries. Along with the iterative solution to Poisson's equation, a technique of coarse-fine sequencing is employed to accelerate numerical convergence. GRAPE program control cards and input data are entered via the NAMELIST feature. Each variable has a default value such that user supplied data is kept to a minimum. Basic input data consists of the boundary specification, mesh point spacings on the boundaries, and mesh line angles at the boundaries. Output consists of a dataset containing the grid data and, if requested, a plot of the generated mesh.
This program was released by NASA through COSMIC as ARC-11379. The italicized text above is from the official NASA release.
The title GRAPE comes from GRids About Practically Everything.