Streamline upwind/Petrov-Galerkin formulations for convection dominated flows with particular emphasis on the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations

A new finite element formulation for convection dominated flows is developed. The basis of the formulation is the streamline upwind concept, which provides an accurate multidimensional generalization of optimal one-dimensional upwind schemes. When implemented as a consistent Petrov-Galerkin weighted residual method, it is shown that the new formulation is not subject to the artificial diffusion criticisms associated with many classical upwind methods. The accuracy of the streamline upwind/Petrov-Galerkin formulation for the linear advection diffusion equation is demonstrated on several numerical examples. The formulation is extended to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. An efficient implicit pressure/explicit velocity transient algorithm is developed which accomodates several treatments of the incompressibility constraint and allows for multiple iterations within a time step. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated on the problem of vortex shedding from a circular cylinder at a Reynolds number of 100.