Assessment of Artificial Dissipation Models for Three-Dimensional Incompressible Flow Solutions

Abstract

Various approaches for constructing artificial dissipation terms for three-dimensional artificial compressibility algorithms are presented and evaluated. Two, second-order accurate, central-differencing schemes, with explicitly added scalar and matrix-valued fourth-difference artificial dissipation, respectively, and a third-order accurate flux-difference splitting upwind scheme are implemented in a multigrid time-stepping procedure and applied to calculate laminar flow through a strongly curved duct. Extensive grid-refinement studies are carried out to investigate the grid sensitivity of each discretization approach. The calculations indicate that even the finest mesh employed, consisting of over 700,000 grid nodes, is not sufficient to establish grid independent solutions. However, all three schemes appear to converge toward the same solution as the grid spacing approaches zero. The matrix-valued dissipation scheme introduces the least amount of artificial dissipation and should be expected to yield the most accurate solutions on a given mesh. The flux-difference splitting upwind scheme, on the other hand, is more dissipative and, thus, particularly sensitive to grid resolution, but exhibits the best overall convergence characteristics on grids with large aspect ratios.