A preconditioned semi-staggered dilation-free finite volume method for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on all-hexahedral elements

A new semi-staggered finite volume method is presented for the solution of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on all-quadrilateral (2D)/ hexahedral (3D) meshes. The velocity components are defined at element node points while the pressure term is defined at element centroids. The continuity equation is satisfied exactly within each elements. The checkerboard pressure oscillations are prevented using a special filtering matrix as a preconditioner for the saddle-point problem resulting from second-order discretization of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The preconditioned saddle-point problem is solved using block preconditioners with GMRES solver. In order to achieve higher performance FORTRAN source code is based on highly efficient PETSc and HYPRE libraries. As test cases the 2D/3D lid-driven cavity flow problem and the 3D flow past array of circular cylinders are solved in order to verify the accuracy of the proposed method.