Staggered discontinuous Galerkin methods for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations

Abstract

In this paper, we present a staggered discontinuous Galerkin method for the approximation of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. Our new method combines the advantages of discontinuous Galerkin methods and staggered meshes, and results in many good properties, namely local and global conservations, optimal convergence and superconvergence through the use of a local postprocessing technique. Another key feature is that our method provides a skew-symmetric discretization of the convection term, with the aim of giving a better conservation property compared with existing discretizations. We will present extensive numerical results, including Kovasznay flow, Taylor vortex flow, lid-driven cavity flow, parallel plate flow and channel expansion flow, to show the performance of the method.