DISCRETIZATION OF INCOMPRESSIBLE MESHES VORTICITY-VELOCITY EQUATIONS ON TRIANGULAR

SUMMARY This paper describes a new approach to discretizing first- and second-order partial differential equations. It combines the advantages of finite elements and finite differences in having both unstructured (triangular/tetrahedral) meshes and low-order physically intuitive schemes. In this ‘co-volume’ framework, the discretized gradient, divergence, curl, (scalar) Laplacian, and vector Laplacian operators satisfy relationships found in standard vector field theory, such as a Helmholtz decomposition. This article focuses on the vorticity-velocity formulation for planar incompressible flows. The algorithm is described and some supporting numerical evidence is provided.