A weakly-compressible Cartesian grid approach for hydrodynamic flows

Abstract The present article aims at proposing an original strategy to solve hydrodynamic flows. In introduction, the motivations for this strategy are developed. It aims at modeling viscous and turbulent flows including complex moving geometries, while avoiding meshing constraints. The proposed approach relies on a weakly-compressible formulation of the Navier–Stokes equations. Unlike most hydrodynamic CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) solvers usually based on implicit incompressible formulations, a fully-explicit temporal scheme is used. A purely Cartesian grid is adopted for numerical accuracy and algorithmic simplicity purposes. This characteristic allows an easy use of Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) methods embedded within a massively parallel framework. Geometries are automatically immersed within the Cartesian grid with an AMR compatible treatment. The method proposed uses an Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) adapted to the weakly-compressible formalism and imposed smoothly through a regularization function, which stands as another originality of this work. All these features have been implemented within an in-house solver based on this WCCH (Weakly-Compressible Cartesian Hydrodynamic) method which meets the above requirements whilst allowing the use of high-order ( > 3 ) spatial schemes rarely used in existing hydrodynamic solvers. The details of this WCCH method are presented and validated in this article.