Equal-order interpolations: a unified approach to stabilize the incompressible and advective effects

Abstract In this paper we present a new SUPG formulation for compressible and near incompressible Navier-Stokes equations [5]. It introduces an extension of the exact solution for one-dimensional systems to the multidimensional case, in a similar way to that arising in the scalar problem. It is important to note that this formulation satisfies both the one-dimensional advective-diffusive system limit case and the advection-dominated multidimensional system case presented by Mallet et al. Another interesting feature of this formulation is that it introduces naturally a stabilizing term for the incompressibility condition, in a similar way to that found by other authors [1–4]. However, in our formulation the stabilization is introduced to the whole system of equations, while other authors introduce a term to stabilize the incompressibility condition and another one for the advective term. In Section 1 we present Navier-Stokes equations for compressible flow and, then, we pass to detail several topics related to the numerical discretization of such advective-diffusive multidimensional systems of PDEs, in the Petrov-Galerkin context. The method is applicable and described for the general Re > 0 laminar flow, but the nature of the stabilizing effect of the artificial diffusion matrix introduced is discussed in depth for the simpler Stokes (Re = 0) flow. Several numerical results are shown in Section 5, taking the well-known test problem of the square-cavity and a variant of this, namely a multiply connected square-cavity, as a validation for this code.