Efficient Numerical Methods for Unsteady Viscous Incompressible Flows

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DMS-9805621 EFFICIENT NUMERICAL METHODS FOR VISCOUS INCOMPRESSIBLE FLOWS Jian-Guo Liu Project Summary This project will focus on continuing the development of efficient, accurate, high order finite difference and finite element methods for the unsteady viscous incompressible Navier-Stokes equations (NSE), with emphasis on finding efficient time stepping procedures and new formulations of the equations better suited to numerical computation. Some practical aspects of the methods, including extensions to flows in general 2D and 3D domains, and applications to more challenging physical problems, will be investigated. In the vorticity formulation, a new time-stepping procedure is used for high Reynolds number flows. For such flows the convection and viscous terms are treated explicitly. The stream function, and hence the velocity, is then evaluated from the vorticity via the kinematic equation. The key to the efficiency of the new time-stepping procedure is that the value of the vorticity on the boundary is obtained explicitly from the steam function without any iteration. This eliminates some traditional difficulties associated with the vorticity formulation. More akin to the primitive variable formulation, the investigator is using a new formulation of the NSE in the impulse density variable which differs from the velocity by a gauge transformation. The gauge freedom enables one to assign simple and specific boundary conditions for both the impulse and gauge fields, thus eliminating some traditional difficulties such as the pressure boundary condition. This new class of efficient numerical methods has already been used to study such real world problems as the investigation of the mechanism of drag reduction on airfoils at high velocities, as well as the development of severe storms in tropical latitudes. These methods provide an important tool that allow scientists and engineers to study related fluid problems in manufacturing and industry that were previous unsolvable with currently available numerical techniques. They represent a significant step forward in the efficient computation of solutions to such problems, and are naturally suited for implementation on high performance massively parallel computer architectures.