A coarse-grid incremental pressure projection method for accelerating low Reynolds number incompressible flow simulations

Coarse-grid projection (CGP) multigrid techniques are applicable to sets of equations that include at least one decoupled linear elliptic equation. In CGP, the linear elliptic equation is solved on a coarsened grid compared to the other equations, leading to savings in computation time and complexity. One of the most important applications of CGP is when a pressure correction scheme is used to obtain a numerical solution to the Navier–Stokes equations. In that case, there is an elliptic pressure Poisson equation. Depending on the pressure correction scheme used, the CGP method and its performance in terms of acceleration rate and accuracy level vary. The CGP framework has been established for non-incremental pressure projection techniques. In this article, we apply CGP methodology for the first time to incremental pressure correction schemes. Both standard and rotational forms of the incremental algorithms are considered. The influence of velocity Dirichlet and natural homogenous boundary conditions in regular and irregular domains with structured and unstructured triangular finite element meshes is investigated. $$L^2$$ L 2 norms demonstrate that the level of accuracy of the velocity and the pressure fields is preserved for up to three levels of coarsening. For the test cases investigated, the speedup factors range approximately from 1.2 to 102.7.