A new formulation, a gauge formulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in terms of an auxiliary field $\mathbf{a}$ and a gauge variable $\phi$, $\mathbf{u} =\mathbf{a}+\nabla\phi$, was proposed recently by E and Liu. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of their formulation and verifies the computational advantages. We discuss the implicit gauge method, which uses backward Euler or Crank-Nicolson in time discretization. However, the boundary conditions for the auxiliary field $\mathbf{a}$ are implemented explicitly (vertical extrapolation). The resulting momentum equation is decoupled from the kinematic equation, and the computational cost is reduced to solving a standard heat and Poisson equation. Moreover, such explicit boundary conditions for the auxiliary field $\mathbf{a}$ will be shown to be unconditionally stable for Stokes equations. For the full nonlinear Navier-Stokes equations the time stepping constraint is reduced to the standard CFL constraint ${\triangle t} / {\triangle x} \le C$. We also prove first order convergence of the gauge method when we use MAC grids as our spatial discretization. The optimal error estimate for the velocity field is also obtained.

A finite element method for computing viscous incompressible flows based on the gauge formulation introduced in [Weinan E, Liu J-G. Gauge method for viscous incompressible flows. Journal of Computational Physics (submitted)] is presented. This formulation replaces the pressure by a gauge variable. This new gauge variable is a numerical tool and differs from the standard gauge variable that arises from decomposing a compressible velocity field. It has the advantage that an additional boundary condition can be assigned to the gauge variable, thus eliminating the issue of a pressure boundary condition associated with the original primitive variable formulation. The computational task is then reduced to solving standard heat and Poisson equations, which are approximated by straightforward, piecewise linear (or higher-order) finite elements. This method can achieve high-order accuracy at a cost comparable with that of solving standard heat and Poisson equations. It is naturally adapted to complex geometry and it is much simpler than traditional finite element methods for incompressible flows. Several numerical examples on both structured and unstructured grids are presented. Copyright

We propose a simple and efficient finite-difference method for the incompressible MHD equation. The numerical method combines the advantage of the MAC scheme for the Navier–Stokes equation and Yee's scheme for the Maxwell equation. In particular, the semi-discrete version of our scheme introduces no numerical dissipation and preserves the energy identity exactly.

A very simple and efficient finite element method is introduced for two and three dimensional viscous incompressible flows using the vorticity formulation. This method relies on recasting the traditional finite element method in the spirit of the high order accurate finite difference methods introduced by the authors in another work. Optimal accuracy of arbitrary order can be achieved using standard finite element or spectral elements. The method is convectively stable and is particularly suited for moderate to high Reynolds number flows.

We give an elementary proof of the convergence of the point vortex method (PVM) to a classical weak solution for the two-dimensional incompressible Euler equations with initial vorticity being a finite Radon measure of distinguished sign and the initial velocity of locally bounded energy. This includes the important example of vortex sheets, which exhibits the classical Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. A surprise fact is that although the velocity fields generated by the point vortex method do not have bounded local kinetic energy, the limiting velocity field is shown to have a bounded local kinetic energy.