Fluid flow simulation with an H2-accelerated Boundary-Domain Integral Method

The development of new numerical methods for fluid flow simulations is challenging but such tools may help to understand flow problems better. Here, the Boundary-Domain Integral Method is applied to simulate laminar fluid flow governed by a dimensionless velocity–vorticity formulation of the Navier–Stokes equation. The Reynolds number is chosen in all examples small enough to ensure laminar flow conditions. The false transient approach is utilized to improve stability.

As all boundary element methods, the Boundary-Domain Integral Method has a quadratic complexity. Here, the $H^2$-methodology is applied to obtain an almost linear complexity. This acceleration technique is not only applied to the boundary only part but more important to the domain related part of the formulation. The application of the $H^2$-methodology does not allow to use the rigid body method to determine the singular integrals and the integral free term as done until now. It is shown how to apply the technique of Guigiani and Gigante to handle the strongly singular integrals in this application. Further, a parametric study shows the influence of the introduced approximation parameters. For this purpose the example of a lid driven cavity is utilized. The second example demonstrates the performance of the proposed method by simulating the Hagen–Poiseuille flow in a pipe. The third example considers the flow around a rigid cylinder to show the behavior of the method for an unstructured grid. All examples show that the proposed method results in an almost linear complexity as the mathematical analysis promisses.