This is the first of a series of papers on the subject of projection methods for viscous incompressible flow calculations. The purpose of these papers is to provide a thorough understanding of the numerical phenomena involved in the projection methods, particularly when boundaries are present, and point to ways of designing more efficient, robust, and accurate numerical methods based on the primitive variable formulation. This paper contains the following topics: 1. convergence and optimal error estimates for both velocity and pressure up to the boundary; 2. explicit characterization of the numerical boundary layers in the pressure approximations and the intermediate velocity fields; 3. the effect of choosing different numerical boundary conditions at the projection step. We will show that a different choice of boundary conditions gives rise to different boundary layer structures. In particular, the straightforward Dirichlet boundary condition for the pressure leads to O(1) numerical boundary layers in the pressure and deteriorates the accuracy in the interior; and 4. postprocessing the numerical solutions to get more accurate approximations for the pressure.

In this paper, we propose an unfitted Nitsche's method for computing wave modes in topological materials. The proposed method is based on Nitsche's technique to study the performance-enhanced topological materials which have strongly heterogeneous structures (e.g., the refractive index is piecewise constant with high contrasts). For periodic bulk materials, we use Floquet-Bloch theory and solve an eigenvalue problem on a torus with unfitted meshes. For the materials with a line defect, a sufficiently large domain with zero boundary conditions is used to compute the localized eigenfunctions corresponding to the edge modes. The interfaces are handled by Nitsche's method on an unfitted uniform mesh. We prove the proposed methods converge optimally, and present numerical examples to validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the capability of simulating topological materials.

We use a suite of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations, run by two fixed grid codes, in the context of LCDM model to investigate the properties of solenoidal and dilatational, i.e, curl and compressive, motions of the intergalactic medium (IGM), and the impact of numerical viscosity on turbulence. The codes differ only in the spatial difference discretization, one is a second-order TVD scheme and the other is a fifth-order positivity-preserving WENO scheme. We find that (1) The vortical motion grows rapidly since $z=2$, and reaches $\sim 10 km/s -75 km/s$, depending on the gas density, at low redshifts. The small-scale compressive ratio $r_{CS}$ drops from $0.8$ to $0.5$ during the same period. (2) Power spectra of the solenoidal velocity possess two regimes, $\propto k^{-0.89}$ and $\propto k^{-2.02}$, while the total velocity and dilatational velocity follow the scaling $k^{-1.88}$ and $k^{-2.20}$ respectively all through the turbulent scale $\sim 2-0.2 h^{-1}Mpc$. The IGM turbulence may contain two different phases, the supersonic phase and the post-supersonic phase, simultaneously along the hierarchical structure formation history. (3) The non-thermal pressure support, measured by the vortical kinetic energy, is comparable with the thermal pressure for $\rho_b \sim 10$, or $T \sim 10^5 K$ at $z=0.25$. The deviation of the baryon fraction from the cosmic mean shows a positive correlation with the turbulence pressure support. (4) A relatively higher numerical viscosity would artificially dissipate both the compressive and vortical motions in the IGM more seriously, resulting in less developed density fluctuation and vorticity, and leading to remarkably shortened turbulence scale. Shocks in regions out of the clusters are outstandingly suppressed by the numerical viscosity since $z=2$, which could directly cause the different levels of turbulence in the IGM between the codes. We also discuss the impact of ingredients not included in our simulation.

Two fundamental difficulties are encountered in the numerical evaluation of time- dependent layer potentials. One is the quadratic cost of history dependence, which has been successfully addressed by splitting the potentials into two parts—a local part that contains the most recent contributions and a history part that contains the con- tributions from all earlier times. The history part is smooth, easily discretized using high-order quadratures, and straightforward to compute using a variety of fast algo- rithms. The local part, however, involves complicated singularities in the underlying Green’s function. Existing methods, based on exchanging the order of integration in space and time, are able to achieve high-order accuracy, but are limited to the case of stationary boundaries. Here, we present a new quadrature method that leaves the order of integration unchanged, making use of a change of variables that converts the singular integrals with respect to time into smooth ones. We have also derived asymptotic formulas for the local part that lead to fast and accurate hybrid schemes, extending earlier work for scalar heat potentials and applicable to moving boundaries. The performance of the overall scheme is demonstrated via numerical examples.

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