A Conservative and Monotone Characteristic Finite Element Solver for Three-Dimensional Transport and Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations on Unstructured Grids

A Conservative and Monotone Characteristic Finite Element Solver for Three-Dimensional Transport and Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations on Unstructured Grids

Year:    2022

Author:    Bassou Khouya, Mofdi El-Amrani, Mohammed Seaid

Communications in Computational Physics, Vol. 31 (2022), Iss. 1 : pp. 224–256

Abstract

We propose a mass-conservative and monotonicity-preserving characteristic finite element method for solving three-dimensional transport and incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on unstructured grids. The main idea in the proposed algorithm consists of combining a mass-conservative and monotonicity-preserving modified method of characteristics for the time integration with a mixed finite element method for the space discretization. This class of computational solvers benefits from the geometrical flexibility of the finite elements and the strong stability of the modified method of characteristics to accurately solve convection-dominated flows using time steps larger than its Eulerian counterparts. In the current study, we implement three-dimensional limiters to convert the proposed solver to a fully mass-conservative and essentially monotonicity-preserving method in addition of a low computational cost. The key idea lies on using quadratic and linear basis functions of the mesh element where the departure point is localized in the interpolation procedures. The proposed method is applied to well-established problems for transport and incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in three space dimensions. The numerical results illustrate the performance of the proposed solver and support its ability to yield accurate and efficient numerical solutions for three-dimensional convection-dominated flow problems on unstructured tetrahedral meshes.

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Journal Article Details

Publisher Name:    Global Science Press

Language:    English

DOI:    https://doi.org/10.4208/cicp.OA-2020-0229

Communications in Computational Physics, Vol. 31 (2022), Iss. 1 : pp. 224–256

Published online:    2022-01

AMS Subject Headings:    Global Science Press

Copyright:    COPYRIGHT: © Global Science Press

Pages:    33

Keywords:    Mass-conservative monotonicity-preserving modified method of characteristics finite element method convection-dominated problems incompressible Navier-Stokes equations.

Author Details

Bassou Khouya

Mofdi El-Amrani

Mohammed Seaid