A Hybrid Pressure Formulation of the Face-Centred Finite Volume Method for Viscous Laminar Incompressible Flows

Abstract

This work presents a hybrid pressure face-centred finite volume (FCFV) solver to simulate steady-state incompressible Navier-Stokes flows. The method leverages the robustness, in the incompressible limit, of the hybridisable discontinuous Galerkin paradigm for compressible and weakly compressible flows to derive the formulation of a novel, low-order face-based discretization. The incompressibility constraint is enforced in a weak sense by introducing an inter-cell mass flux, defined in terms of a new, hybrid variable that represents the pressure at the cell faces. This results in a new hybridization strategy where cell variables (velocity, pressure, and deviatoric strain rate tensor) are expressed as a function of velocity and pressure at the barycentre of the cell faces. The hybrid pressure formulation provides first-order convergence of all variables, including the stress, without the need for gradient reconstruction, thus being less sensitive to cell type, stretching, distortion, and skewness than traditional low-order finite volume solvers. Numerical benchmarks of Navier-Stokes flows at low and moderate Reynolds numbers, in two and three dimensions, are presented to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of the method. In particular, the hybrid pressure formulation outperforms the FCFV method when convective effects are relevant, achieving accurate predictions on significantly coarser meshes.