I have a low speed flow with a high voltage discharge occurring within it between two spherical electrodes. We have quite a bit of data from the experiment and have performed 0-D modeling of the chemical kinetics within the plasma discharge, however our next step is to expand the modeling with 1 or 2 spacial dimensions.
One issue with this is that we have a shockwave propagating from the plasma and one of the electrodes that moves downstream. To properly capture this shockwave at all time with a single mesh would require a very fine meshing for the first couple centimeters around the plasma.
My question is, since we have Schlieren images of the shockwave, and know where it is in time, would it be worth while to recompute a mesh for each time step with refinement only where the shock should be, interpolate onto it, and then advance the time rather than using a static mesh. The static mesh would avoid two of the previous steps, however would likely require time advancing on meshes with significantly more points than the dynamic case.