Recent advances in the marker and cell method

Abstract

In this article recent advances in the MAC method will be reviewed. The MAC technique dates back to the early sixties at the Los Alamos Laboratories and this paper starts with a historical review, and then a summary of related techniques. Improvements since the early days of MAC (and the Simplified MAC-SMAC) include automatic time-stepping, the use of the conjugate gradient method to solve the Poisson equation for the corrected velocity potential, greater efficiency through stripping out all particles (markers) other than those near the free surface, more accurate approximations of the free surface boundary conditions, the addition of a bounded high accuracy upwinding for the convected terms (thereby being able to solve higher Reynolds number flows), and a (dynamic) flow visualization facility. This article will concentrate, in the main, on a three-dimensional version of the SMAC method. It will show how to approximate curved boundaries by considering one configurational example in detail; the same will also be done for the free surface. The article will avoid validation, but rather focus on many of the examples and applications that the MAC method can solve from turbulent flows to rheology. It will conclude with some speculative comments on the future direction of the methodology.