A stabilized incremental projection scheme for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations

Abstract

AbstractIt is well known that any spatial discretization of the saddle‐point Stokes problem should satisfy the Ladyzhenskaya–Brezzi–Babuska (LBB) stability condition in order to prevent the appearance of spurious pressure modes. Particularly, if an equal‐order approximation is applied, the Schur complement (or, as called some times, the Uzawa matrix) of the pressure system has a non‐trivial null space that gives rise to such modes. An idea in the past was that all the schemes that solve a Poisson equation for the pressure rather than the Uzawa pressure equation (splitting/projection methods) should overcome this difficulty; this idea was wrong. There is numerical evidence that at least the so‐called incremental projection scheme still suffers from spurious pressure oscillations if an equal‐order approximation is applied. The present paper tries to distinguish which projection requires LBB‐compliant approximation and which does not. Moreover, a stabilized version of the incremental projection scheme is derived. Proper bounds for the stabilization parameter are also given. The numerical results show that the stabilized scheme does indeed achieve second‐order accuracy and does not produce spurious (node to node) pressure oscillations. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.