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.

We begin a systematical study on the effect of numerical viscosities. In this paper we investigate the behavior of shock-capturing methods for slowly moving shocks. It is known that for slowly moving shocks even a first-order scheme, such as the Godunov or Roe type methods, will generate downstream oscillatory wave patterns that cannot be effectively damped by the dissipation of these first-order schemes. The purpose of this paper is to understand the formation and behavior of these downstream patterns. Our study shows that the downstream errors are generated by the unsteady nature of the viscous shock profiles and behave diffusively. The scenario is as follows. When solving the compressible Euler equations by shock capturing methods, the smeared density profile introduces a momentum spike at the shock location if the shock moves slowly. Downstream waves will necessarily emerge in order to balance the momentum mass carried by the spike for the momentum conservation. Although each family of waves decays inl∞andl2while they preserve the same mass, the perturbing nature of the viscous or spike profile is a constant source for the generation of new downstream waves, causing spurious solutions foralltime. Higher order TVD or ENO type interpolations accentuate this problem.

In this paper, we review some recent progress made in [4, 5, 6] on finite difference schemes for viscous incompressible flows using vorticity formulation. The main purpose of this series of papers [4, 5, 6] is to resurrect the idea of using local vorticity boundary condition for unsteady calculation. The emphasis is on simplicity of the methods. Three main issues will be discussed: efficient time-stepping procedures and cell Reynolds number constraints, efficient methods in 3D on non-staggered grids and efficient high order methods using compact differencing.

This paper discusses three basic issues related to the design of finite difference schemes for unsteadyviscous incompressible flows using vorticity formulations: the boundary condition for vorticity, an efficient time-stepping procedure, and the relation between these schemes and the ones based on velocity-pressure formulation. We show that many of the newly developed global vorticity boundary conditions can actually be written as some local formulas derived earlier. We also show that if we couple a standard centered difference scheme with third- or fourth-order explicit Runge-Kutta methods, the resulting schemes have nocell Reynolds number constraints. For high Reynolds number flows, these schemes are stable under the CFL condition given by the convective terms. Finally, we show that the classical MAC scheme is the same as Thom's formula coupled with second-order centered differences in the interior, in the sense that one can define discrete vorticity in a natural way for the MAC scheme and get the same values as the ones computed from Thom's formula. We use this to derive an efficient fourth-order Runge-Kutta time discretization for the MAC scheme from the one for Thom's formula. We present numerical results for driven cavity flow at high Reynolds number (10 ).

A new fourth-order accurate finite difference scheme for the computation of unsteady viscous incompressible flows is introduced. The scheme is based on the vorticity-stream function formulation. It is essentially compact and has the nice features of a compact scheme with regard to the treatment of boundary conditions. It is also very efficient, at every time step or Runge–Kutta stage, only two Poisson-like equations have to be solved. The Poisson-like equations are amenable to standard fast Poisson solvers usually designed for second order schemes. Detailed comparison with the second-order scheme shows the clear superiority of this new fourth-order scheme in resolving both the boundary layers and the gross features of the flow. This efficient fourth-order scheme also made it possible to compute the driven cavity flow at Reynolds number 106on a 10242grid at a reasonable cost. Fourth-order convergence is proved under mild regularity requirements. This is the first such result to our knowledge