Cell-centered Finite Volume Research Articles

A nonlinear scheme preserving maximum principle for heterogeneous anisotropic diffusion equation

We present a new nonlinear method in order to preserve the maximum principle for the diffusion problem with heterogeneous anisotropic coefficient. It is well-known that for diffusion problems with general discontinuous coefficients, the existing cell-centered finite volume schemes on general meshes cannot unconditionally satisfy the discrete maximum principle (DMP), i.e., there are always certain severe restrictions on the mesh-cell geometry or locations of discontinuity in order to preserve DMP. To deal with the issue we propose a nonlinear method of modifying discrete flux of linear second-order schemes into a new conservative flux. Then the resulting scheme keeps conservation and accuracy, and has the structure preserving maximum principle without imposing those severe restrictions. Specifically, we will start with the diamond scheme whose flux is linear and has second-order accuracy, but has no the structure preserving maximum principle. Then the nonlinear correction method is applied to get a scheme satisfying the discrete maximum principle unconditionally. We give some theoretical analysis including the coercivity property and a prior estimation. Numerical results show that the accuracy of our new scheme is superior to the existing scheme preserving maximum principle, and in some cases the accuracy can even be improved by one order of magnitude.

Pragmatic modelling of axial flow-induced vibration (FIV) for nuclear fuel rods

Flow-induced vibration (FIV) at the spacer grid in the fuel assembly of a Light Water Reactor (LWR) is the leading cause of fuel failure. This project aims to produce a simulation benchmark on the experimental campaign at MACE on axial FIV of a cantilever beam in an annular tube, that mimics the configuration and environment of a typical LWR. The nuclear fuel rod, which consists of fuel pellets filled in Zirconium alloy cladding is modelled in the experiment as a steel rod filled with lead shots that closely approximates the filling density of the fuel pellet. To reduce the complexity and increase the efficiency of the simulation, further simplification is applied by on the geometry and assuming the solid domain as a single material instead of multiple materials. The first mode of frequency of the rod vibrating in quiescent water, which had been validated via the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory against experimental measurements, was used to design the single-material solid domain. Two models were proposed, firstly a solid rod with lower density and stiffness (SLE), and secondly an empty cladding with high density and low stiffness (EHD). Both solid and fluid domains were discretised using the cell-centred finite volume (FV) method and coupled with strong two-way fluid-structure interaction (FSI). Results on the frequency of vibration in quiescent water and in axial flow showed good agreement with experimental measurement, and the computational efficiency is analyzed for different rod models and changes in parameters of the solid domains.

Direct numerical simulation of acoustic wave propagation in ocean waveguides using a parallel finite volume solver

Numerical simulations based on the Finite Volume Method (FVM) solve the wave equation directly to provide highly accurate predictions of the sound field in ocean waveguides without model simplification and loss of generality. However, the huge computational complexity severely limits the application range of direct numerical solvers for underwater acoustic waves. In this paper, a highly scalable parallel algorithm for solving acoustic models using the cell-centred finite volume method was proposed, and a corresponding direct numerical solver was developed and validated. The paper has three main findings as follows. Firstly, the acoustic solver was implemented based on a generic framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), so that more complicated models such as fluid–sound coupling and sound–structure coupling could be easily extended. Secondly, the large spatial scales of underwater sound propagation can be efficiently calculated by parallel computing. Thirdly, our approach demonstrated high computational accuracy and the ability to support complex scenarios. We verify the accuracy and efficiency of the solver through experiments, and prove the solving ability of the solver in large-scale, complex structures and complex configurations.

A numerical solver for investigating the space charge effect on theelectric field in liquid argon time projection chambers

This paper reports the development of a numerical solver aimed to simulate the interaction between the space charge (i.e. ions) distribution and the electric field in liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) detectors. The ion transport equation is solved by a time-accurate, cell-centered finite volume method and the electric potential equation by a continuous finite element method. The electric potential equation updates the electric field which provides the drift velocity to the ion transport equation. The ion transport equation updates the space charge density distribution which appears as the source term in the electric potential equation. The interaction between the space charge distribution and the electric field is numerically simulated within each physical time step. The convective velocity in the ion transport equation can include the background flow velocity in addition to the electric drift velocity. The numerical solver has been parallelized using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. Numerical tests show and verify the capability and accuracy of the current numerical solver. It is planned that the developed numerical solver, together with a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package which provides the flow velocity field, can be used to investigate the space charge effect on the electric field in large-scale particle detectors.

Numerical Simulation of Ice Melting Using the Finite Volume Method

The Aim of this paper is to investigate numerically the simulation of ice melting in one and two dimension using the cell-centered finite volume method. The mathematical model is based on the heat conduction equation associated with a fixed grid, latent heat source approach. The fully implicit time scheme is selected to represent the time discretization. The ice conductivity is chosento be the value of the approximated conductivity at the interface between adjacent ice and water control volumes. The predicted temperature distribution, percentage melt fraction, interface location and its velocity is compared with those obtained from the exact analytical solution. A good agreement is obtained when comparing the numerical results of one dimensional temperaturedistribution with the analytical results.

A total energy-based adaptive mesh refinement technique for the simulation of compressible flow

In this paper, an adaptive mesh refinement technique is presented for simulation of compressible flows, which can effectively refine the mesh in the regions with shock waves and vortices. The present approach uses the total energy per unit volume as an indicator to capture the shock waves and vortical structures. In the approach, an h-refinement strategy is adopted. To save the computational effort, the flow variables on the new mesh are obtained from the previous step by interpolation, which ensures that the problem is always solved on the refined mesh. Both inviscid and viscous compressible flows are considered in this work. Their governing equations are, respectively, Euler equations and Navier–Stokes equations associated with the implementation of the Spalart–Allmaras turbulence model. The cell-centered finite volume method and Jameson scheme are chosen to carry out spatial discretization, and the five-stage Runge–Kutta scheme is applied to discretize the temporal derivative. The present approach is applied to simulate three test problems for its validation. Numerical results show that it can effectively capture the shock waves and vortices with improvement in solution accuracy.

Benchmarking the face-centred finite volume method for compressible laminar flows

Purpose This study aims to assess the robustness and accuracy of the face-centred finite volume (FCFV) method for the simulation of compressible laminar flows in different regimes, using numerical benchmarks. Design/methodology/approach The work presents a detailed comparison with reference solutions published in the literature –when available– and numerical results computed using a commercial cell-centred finite volume software. Findings The FCFV scheme provides first-order accurate approximations of the viscous stress tensor and the heat flux, insensitively to cell distortion or stretching. The strategy demonstrates its efficiency in inviscid and viscous flows, for a wide range of Mach numbers, also in the incompressible limit. In purely inviscid flows, non-oscillatory approximations are obtained in the presence of shock waves. In the incompressible limit, accurate solutions are computed without pressure correction algorithms. The method shows its superior performance for viscous high Mach number flows, achieving physically admissible solutions without carbuncle effect and predictions of quantities of interest with errors below 5%. Originality/value The FCFV method accurately evaluates, for a wide range of compressible laminar flows, quantities of engineering interest, such as drag, lift and heat transfer coefficients, on unstructured meshes featuring distorted and highly stretched cells, with an aspect ratio up to ten thousand. The method is suitable to simulate industrial flows on complex geometries, relaxing the requirements on mesh quality introduced by existing finite volume solvers and alleviating the need for time-consuming manual procedures for mesh generation to be performed by specialised technicians.

A modified zonal method to solve coupled conduction-radiation physics within highly porous large scale digitized cellular porous materials

Due to their distinct textures, porous cellular materials have been of interest to many engineering applications. Energy conversion through such materials, especially at high temperatures, is governed by naturally coupled conduction-radiation physics. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the conduction-radiation behavior within these materials is important to properly design and optimize these materials. Several numerical methods developed over the last few decades allow to solve and study the influence of different textural parameters on coupled conductive-radiative heat transfers. These numerical methods require 3D digitized images of the sample of interest obtained either using 3D imagery technique or generated using numerical algorithms. To better represent the complex geometry, the 3D image of the sample requires high spatial resolution, and for a sample which is representative of involved physics might contain hundreds of millions of voxels which is complex to solve and computationally expensive. To cope with this issue, we developed a parallelized discrete scale numerical approach using cell centered Finite Volume Method (FVM) and deterministic ray tracing to solve coupled heat transfer within highly porous large scale complex cellular materials. At the heart of this method rests a decomposition approach based on modified zonal method which significantly reduces the coupling efforts, memory requirements, and computation time. The results of two test cases presented in this study are cross-verified with those presented in literature and computed using Star-CCM+ software. Finally, the method is applied to virtual fibrous sample. These results present the ability of the solver to consider different boundary conditions, at large temperature gradient across boundaries, and to deal with large samples consisting hundreds of million of voxels while providing accurate results. We also present and discuss the sensitivity of other associated parameters on the final results.

Higher-order cell-centered finite volume scheme for the simulation of elastic-plastic flows in 3D

Higher-order cell-centered finite volume scheme for the simulation of elastic-plastic flows in 3D

An Interpolation-Free Cell-Centered Finite Volume Scheme for 3D Anisotropic Convection-Diffusion Equations on Arbitrary Polyhedral Meshes

An Interpolation-Free Cell-Centered Finite Volume Scheme for 3D Anisotropic Convection-Diffusion Equations on Arbitrary Polyhedral Meshes

A constrained boundary gradient reconstruction method for unstructured finite volume discretization of the Euler equations

We propose a novel boundary gradient and solution reconstruction approach for the second-order cell-centered unstructured finite volume method for solving the inviscid Euler equations. The proposed constrained reconstruction method involving ghost cells is shown to be more accurate than several conventional boundary reconstruction methods and linear-exact in the near-boundary areas. In the present procedure, the solutions at the ghost cell centroids are given by solving constraint equations, which are established based on boundary conditions. At the same time, the solution gradients in boundary cells and the solutions in boundary surfaces are obtained altogether, while guaranteeing the compatibility of the boundary conditions with the reconstructed results. A variety of numerical test cases show that the new method effectively reduces the errors of near-boundary approximations and improves the overall numerical accuracy. Furthermore, because the constrained reconstruction is only used for the boundary cells, the extra computational cost barely changes the overall computational efficiency.

An all Froude high order IMEX scheme for the shallow water equations on unstructured Voronoi meshes

We propose a novel numerical method for the solution of the shallow water equations in different regimes of the Froude number making use of general polygonal meshes. The fluxes of the governing equations are split such that advection and acoustic-gravity sub-systems are derived, hence separating slow and fast phenomena. This splitting allows the nonlinear convective fluxes to be discretized explicitly in time, while retaining an implicit time marching for the acoustic-gravity terms. Consequently, the novel schemes are particularly well suited in the low Froude limit of the model, since no numerical viscosity is added in the implicit solver. Besides, stability follows from a milder CFL condition which is based only on the advection speed and not on the celerity. High order time accuracy is achieved using the family of semi-implicit IMEX Runge-Kutta schemes, while high order in space is granted relying on two discretizations: (i) a cell-centered finite volume (FV) scheme for the nonlinear convective contribution on the polygonal cells; (ii) a staggered discontinuous Galerkin (DG) scheme for the solution of the linear system associated to the implicit discretization of the pressure sub-system. Therefore, three different meshes are used, namely a polygonal Voronoi mesh, a triangular subgrid and a staggered quadrilateral subgrid. The novel schemes are proved to be Asymptotic Preserving (AP), hence a consistent discretization of the limit model is retrieved for vanishing Froude numbers, which is given by the so-called “lake at rest” equations. Furthermore, the novel methods are well-balanced by construction, and this property is also demonstrated. Accuracy and robustness are then validated against a set of benchmark test cases with Froude numbers ranging in the interval Fr≈[10−6;5], hence showing that multiple time scales can be handled by the novel methods.

Accelerating FVM-Based Parallel Fluid Simulations with Better Grid Renumbering Methods

Grid renumbering techniques have been shown to be effective in improving the efficiency of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) numerical simulations based on the finite volume method (FVM). However, with the increasing complexity of real-world engineering scenarios, there is still a huge challenge to choose better sequencing techniques to improve parallel simulation performance. This paper designed an improved metric (MDMP) to evaluate the structure of sparse matrices. The metric takes the aggregation of non-zero elements inside the sparse matrix as an evaluation criterion. Meanwhile, combined with the features of the cell-centered finite volume method supporting unstructured grids, we proposed the cell quotient (CQ) renumbering algorithm to further reduce the maximum bandwidth and contours of large sparse matrices with finite volume discretization. Finally, with real-world engineering cases, we quantitatively analyzed the evaluation effect of MDMP and the optimization effect of different renumbering algorithms. The results showed that the classical greedy algorithm reduces the maximum bandwidth of the sparse matrix by at most 60.34% and the profile by 95.38%. Correspondingly, the CQ algorithm reduced them by at most 92.94% and 98.70%. However, in terms of MDMP, the CQ algorithm was 83.43% less optimized than the Greedy algorithm. In terms of overall computational speed, the Greedy algorithm was optimized by a maximum of 38.19%, and the CQ algorithm was optimized by a maximum of 27.31%. The above is in accordance with the evaluation results of the MDMP metric. Thus, our new metric can more accurately evaluate the renumbering method for numerical fluid simulations, which is of great value in selecting a better mesh renumbering method in engineering applications of CFD.

A cell-centered finite volume scheme for the diffusive–viscous wave equation on general polygonal meshes

Seismic wave equations based on numerical simulation have become effective tools in geological exploration. Considering the frequency dependence of reflections and fluid saturation in porous mediums, the diffusive–viscous wave theory is necessary to study. In this paper, a cell-centered finite volume scheme for the diffusive–viscous wave equation is proposed on general distorted polygonal meshes. Numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the convergence rate of the errors in the discrete L2 norm and interpret the effectiveness by a simulation of the actual geological exploration point.

Effects of adiabatic and heat-conducting inserts in natural convection in inclined enclosures

Natural convection in a closed cavity with block-free, adiabatic and heat-conducting blocks was assessed for different inclination angles. The enclosure has vertical walls at different temperatures and adiabatic horizontal walls. The simulations were performed for the laminar regime and two-dimensional approximation. A cell-centered finite volume scheme was used to discretize the governing equations. This work addresses the influence of the Rayleigh number and cavity inclination in the flow pattern, temperature distribution, and local/global Nusselt numbers. It was observed that the largest heat transfer rates take place for heat-conducting blocks and inclination angles owing to higher velocity gradients.

A linearity-preserving technique for finite volume schemes of anisotropic diffusion problems on polygonal meshes

In this work we derive a cell-centered finite volume scheme by a linearity-preserving technique. It solves matrix equation obtained by linearity-preserving criterion and gets the desired approximations. The scheme introduces both cell-centered unknowns and vertex unknowns. The latter are auxiliary and eliminated by the surrounding cell-centered unknowns with a new vertex interpolation algorithm derived by the presented linearity-preserving technique. The proposed technique is flexible and is expected to design algorithms for 3D diffusion problems. Nearly optimal accuracy is found from the numerical experiments. More interesting is that the new vertex interpolation algorithm outperforms some commonly used linearity-preserving algorithms on Kershaw meshes and distorted meshes which have proved difficult for most algorithms.

A high-fidelity solver based on hybrid numerical methods on unstructured grids for incompressible multiphase flows

A high-fidelity solver is developed on the unstructured grids to simulate incompressible multiphase flows with free surface based on volume of fluid (VOF) method. In this framework, the velocity is defined by both volume integrated average (VIA) and point value (PV) as computational variables which are updated simultaneously by volume-average/point-value multi-moment (VPM) method at each time step. Compared with our previous work, a node-based finite element (FE) method is used instead of cell-centered finite volume (FV) method for the discretization of pressure Poisson equation, which provides a new pattern that can naturally treat with the velocity and pressure coupling. It does not require Rhie–Chow interpolation or the use of a Petrov–Galerkin finite element formulation with tunable parameters to circumvent the well-known instability conditions. Moreover, we propose a novel balanced-force formulation with FE discretization to accommodate the surface tension force, which effectively eliminates the large numerical errors associated with the non-orthogonality of unstructured grids. In VOF method, the volume fraction is defined as VIA to identify the moving interface which is updated by solving advection equation through the FV formulation. The resulting model that combines hybrid discretizations, rigorously preserves the mass and momentum conservation, substantially improves the numerical accuracy and robustness of pressure field, and significantly suppresses the spurious velocity to nearly machine error even for multiphase flows with large density ratios. Various numerical examples have been presented to demonstrate the excellent capabilities of present solver which can provide high-fidelity solutions for practical applications in presence of largely deformed interface and highly complex geometry.

A cell-centered finite volume formulation of geometrically exact Simo-Reissner beams with arbitrary initial curvatures.

This article presents a novel total Lagrangian cell‐centered finite volume formulation of geometrically exact beams with arbitrary initial curvatures undergoing large displacements and finite rotations. The choice of rotation parameterization, the mathematical formulation of the beam kinematics, conjugate strain measures, and the linearization of the strong form of governing equations are described. The finite volume based discretization of the computational domain and the governing equations for each computational volume are presented. The discretized integral form of the equilibrium equations is solved using a block‐coupled Newton–Raphson solution procedure. The efficacy of the proposed methodology is presented by comparing the simulated numerical results with classic benchmark test cases available in the literature. The objectivity of strain measures for the current formulation and mesh convergence studies for both initially straight and curved beam configurations are also discussed.

A Pressure-Based Fully-Coupled Flow Algorithm for the Control Volume Finite Element Method

A pressure-based fully-coupled flow algorithm is developed for the control volume finite element method (CVFEM), which covers speeds up to the transonic regime. The CVFEM is used because it presents a number of advantages as compared to the popular cell-centered finite volume method (CCFVM), while retaining the properties of the finite volume method (FVM) in terms of flux conservation and numerical integration simplicity. The implementation presents a novel weak formulation of Dirichlet boundary conditions to resolve the disadvantages emerging from the strong formulation, by mimicking the methods followed in the CCFVM. Derivation and implementation details are presented, and a number of test cases are used to evaluate the accuracy and performance of this approach.

A finite volume scheme preserving the invariant region property for the coupled system of FitzHugh-Nagumo equations on distorted meshes

In this paper, we propose and analyze a finite volume scheme preserving the invariant region property (IRP) for the coupled system of equations of FitzHugh-Nagumo type on distorted meshes. We employ a nonlinear cell-centered finite volume scheme to approximate the flux and implicit Euler scheme to approximate the time derivative. The IRP and existence of solutions are proved for the nonlinear finite volume scheme. We also propose a nonlinear iteration method which adds a specifically designed penalization term to ensure the IRP on each iteration step. Numerical experiments and the comparison with the nine-point finite volume scheme are presented to verify the IRP of our scheme.