Imposing slip conditions on curved boundaries for 3D incompressible flows with a very high-order accurate finite volume scheme on polygonal meshes

Abstract

The conventional no-slip boundary condition does not always hold in several fluid flow applications and must be replaced with appropriate slip conditions according to the wall and fluid properties. However, not only slip boundary conditions are still a subject of discussion among fluid dynamicists, but also their numerical treatment is far from being well-developed, particularly in the context of very high-order accurate methods. The complexity of these conditions significantly increases when the boundary is not aligned with the chosen coordinate system and, even more challenging, when the fluid slips along a curved boundary. The present work proposes a simple and efficient numerical treatment of general slip boundary conditions on arbitrary curved boundaries for three-dimensional fluid flow problems governed by the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. In that regard, two critical challenges arise: (i) achieving very high-order of convergence with arbitrary curved boundaries for the classical no-slip boundary conditions and (ii) extending the developed numerical techniques to impose general slip boundary conditions. The conventional treatment of curved boundaries relies on generating curved meshes to eliminate the geometrical mismatch between the physical and computational boundaries and achieve high-order of convergence. However, such an approach requires sophisticated meshing algorithms, cumbersome quadrature rules on curved elements, and complex non-linear transformations. In contrast, the reconstruction for off-site data (ROD) method handles arbitrary curved boundaries approximated with linear piecewise elements while employing polynomial reconstructions with specific linear constraints to fulfil the prescribed boundary conditions. For that purpose, the general slip boundary conditions are reformulated on a local orthonormal basis to allow a straightforward application of the ROD method with scalar boundary conditions. The Navier–Stokes equations are discretised with a staggered finite volume method, and the numerical fluxes are computed solely on the polygonal mesh elements. Several benchmark test cases of fluid flow problems in non-trivial three-dimensional curved domains are addressed and confirm that the proposed method effectively achieves up to the eighth-order of convergence.