Comparison of varieties of numerical methods applied to lid-driven cavity flow: coupling algorithms, staggered grid vs. collocated grid, and FUDS vs. SUDS

The effectiveness of different methods, schemes, algorithms, and approaches is of substantial challenging problems in numerical modeling of transport phenomena. In the present paper, a lid-driven cavity problem is modeled via two basically different approaches of spatial discretization: collocated and staggered. The non-dimensionalized governing equations are semi-discretized by using a finite volume approach. Then, the full discretization is performed in each of collocated and staggered grids, separately. Upwind and central difference schemes are implemented in order to discretize the convective and diffusion terms of equations, respectively. After mesh independency study, the performances of collocated and staggered grids in comparison with the reference benchmark are presented. Next, the effectiveness of the first and the second order upwind schemes are presented, as well as different coupling algorithms of SIMPLE, SIMPLEC, and SIMPLER. Finally, an overall comparison of the methods is provided and acceptable agreements with benchmark are attained.