Status report on embedded boundary grids.
Marsha Berger (Math & CS, Courant Institute, NYU)

The Cartesian grid embedded boundary approach has attracted much interest in the last decade due to the ease of grid generation for complicated geometries. This approach uses rectangular Cartesian meshes over most of the domain, with irregular (cut) cells only at the intersection of the mesh with the boundary of a solid object. In this talk we first briefly survey our approach to embedded boundary computations, and describe what distinguishes it from level set or other immersed boundary approaches. We then discuss some of the algorithmic issues that arise in this approach. In particular we concentrate on numerical discretizations that avoid loss of accuracy and stability at irregular boundary cells. We end with some computations of 3D flows with collaborators at NASA Ames Research Center.