Multigrid cell-centered techniques for high-order incompressible flow numerical solutions

Abstract A multigrid pressure correction scheme suitable for high order discretizations of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations is developed and demonstrated. The pressure correction equation is discretized with fourth-order compact finite-difference approximations. Iterative methods based on multigrid techniques accelerate the most demanding part of the overall solution algorithm, which is the numerical solution of the arised large and sparse linear system. Geometrical multigrid methods, using partial semicoarsenig strategy and zebra line Gauss–Seidel relaxation, are employed to efficiently approximate the solution of the resulting algebraic linear system. Effects of various multigrid components on the pressure correction procedure are evaluated and new high-order transfer operators are developed for the case of cell-centered grids. Their convergence rates are also compared with commonly used intergrid transfer operators. Furthermore, numerically comparisons between different multigrid cycle approaches, such as V -, W - and F - cycle , are presented. The performance tests demonstrate that the new pressure correction approach significantly reduces the computational effort compared to single-grid algorithms. Furthermore, it is shown that the overall high order accuracy of the numerical method is retained in space and time with increasing Reynolds number.