Modal analysis for incompressible fluid flow

This paper presents a numerical method for incompressible fluid flow. A difficulty in analyzing incompressible fluid flow is that the continuity equation has no time evolution term. In the marker and cell (MAC) method, Poisson’s equation is solved iteratively, which takes most of the computation time, and in the artificial compressibility method (ACM), pseudo-time iteration is necessary to solve for unsteady solutions. Here, modal analysis that uses the velocity eigenvectors corresponding to zero eigenvalues is proposed for analyzing two-dimensional incompressible fluid flow. The proposed method involves only about one third of the number of variables needed in the MAC method and the ACM, and it does not require iterative calculation of Poisson’s equation or pseudo-time iteration. Numerical results for a simple flow system and a cavity flow obtained using the proposed method are compared with those obtained using the ACM and the simplified MAC method. The results agree well, thereby validating the proposed modal analysis.