A multi-moment finite volume method for incompressible Navier–Stokes equations on unstructured grids: Volume-average/point-value formulation

Abstract

A robust and accurate finite volume method (FVM) is proposed for incompressible viscous fluid dynamics on triangular and tetrahedral unstructured grids. Differently from conventional FVM where the volume integrated average (VIA) value is the only computational variable, the present formulation treats both VIA and the point value (PV) as the computational variables which are updated separately at each time step. The VIA is computed from a finite volume scheme of flux form, and is thus numerically conservative. The PV is updated from the differential form of the governing equation that does not have to be conservative but can be solved in a very efficient way. Including PV as the additional variable enables us to make higher-order reconstructions over compact mesh stencil to improve the accuracy, and moreover, the resulting numerical model is more robust for unstructured grids.We present the numerical formulations in both two and three dimensions on triangular and tetrahedral mesh elements. Numerical results of several benchmark tests are also presented to verify the proposed numerical method as an accurate and robust solver for incompressible flows on unstructured grids.