High-Re solutions for incompressible flow using the Navier-Stokes equations and a multigrid method

The vorticity-stream function formulation of the two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equations is used to study the effectiveness of the coupled strongly implicit multigrid (CSI-MG) method in the determination of high-Re fine-mesh flow solutions. The driven flow in a square cavity is used as the model problem. Solutions are obtained for configurations with Reynolds number as high as 10,000 and meshes consisting of as many as 257 × 257 points. For Re = 1000, the (129 × 129) grid solution required 1.5 minutes of CPU time on the AMDAHL 470 V/6 computer. Because of the appearance of one or more secondary vortices in the flow field, uniform mesh refinement was preferred to the use of one-dimensional grid-clustering coordinate transformations.