Numerical Simulation of 3-D Incompressible Unsteady Viscous Laminar Flows

Book excerpt: The GAMM-Commi ttee for Numerical Methods in Fluid Mechanics (GAMM-Fachausschuss für Numerische Methoden in der Strömungsmechanik) has sponsored the organization of a GAMM Workshop dedicated to the numerical simulation of three dimensional incompressible unsteady viscous laminar flows to test Navier-Stokes solvers. The Workshop was held in Paris from June 12th to June 14th, 1991 at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Metiers. Two test problems were set up. The first one is the flow in a driven-lid parallelepipedic cavity at Re = 3200 . The second problem is a flow around a prolate spheroid at incidence. These problems are challenging as fully transient solutions are expected to show up. The difficulties for meaningful calculations come from both space and temporal discretizations which have to be sufficiently accurate to resol ve detailed structures like Taylor-Görtler-like vortices and the appropriate time development. Several research teams from academia and industry tackled the tests using different formulations (veloci ty-pressure, vortici ty velocity), different numerical methods (finite differences, finite volumes, finite elements), various solution algorithms (splitting, coupled ...), various solvers (direct, iterative, semi-iterative) with preconditioners or other numerical speed-up procedures. The results show some scatter and achieve different levels of efficiency. The Workshop was attended by about 25 scientists and drove much interaction between the participants. The contributions in these proceedings are presented in alphabetical order according to the first author, first for the cavi ty problem and then for the prolate spheroid problem. No definite conclusions about benchmark solutions can be drawn.