Three-Dimensional Finite-Volume Method for Incompressible Flows With Complex Boundaries

Abstract

A finite-volume method is presented for calculating incompressible 3-D flows with curved irregular boundaries. The method employs structured nonorthogonal grids, cell-centered variable arrangement, and Cartesian velocity components. A special interpolation procedure for evaluating the mass fluxes at the cell-faces is used to avoid the nonphysical oscillation of flow variables usually encountered with the cell-centered arrangement. The SIMPLE algorithm is used to handle the pressure-velocity coupling. A recently proposed low diffusive and bounded scheme is introduced to approximate the convection terms in the transport equations. The computer code and the relevant data structure are so organized that most of the code except the implicit linear solver used is fully vectorizable so as to exploit the potential of modern vector computers. The capabilities of the numerical procedure are demonstrated by application to a few internal and external three-dimensional laminar flows. In all cases the CPU-time on a grid with typically 28,000 grid nodes was below half a minute.