Unstructured Grid Solutions for Incompressible Laminar Flow over a Circular Cylinder Using a Particular Finite Volume-Finite Element Method

A numerical modeling of a 2D Navier-Stokes equation by a particular vertex centered control volume framework on an unstructured grid is presented in this paper. Triangular elements are applied with an effective high performance fully coupled algorithm, to simulate incompressible laminar flow over a circular cylinder. The cell face velocities in the discretization of the continuity and momentum equations are calculated by a combined linear and momentum interpolation scheme, respectively, and their performances are compared. Flow analyses have been conducted based on various Reynolds numbers up to 200 for the steady and unsteady flows using structured and unstructured grids. The robustness and accuracy of the scheme in the unstructured mesh are proved using the benchmark problems of incompressible laminar flow over a circular cylinder at low and medium Reynolds numbers. Results have been compared with the structured grid results, both cases with equal cell numbers and same strategy for the mesh refinement. Current results display good agreement with the experimental values. Overall, it is shown that, using the suggested method for the current problem, unstructured grids are highly competitive with the structured grids.