Upwind local differential quandrature method for solving coupled viscous flow and heat transfer equations

The differential quadrature method (DQM) has been applied successfully to solve numerically many problems in the fluid mechanics. But it is only limited to the flow problems in regular regions. At the same time, here is no upwind mechanism to deal with the convective property of the fluid flow in traditional DQ method. A local differential quadrature method owning upwind mechanism (ULDQM) was given to solve the coupled problem of incompressible viscous flow and heat transfer in an irregular region. For the problem of flow past a contraction channel whose boundary does not parallel to coordinate direction, the satisfactory numerical solutions were obtained by using ULDQM with a few grid points. The numerical results show that the ULDQM possesses advantages including well convergence, less computational workload and storage as compared with the low-order finite difference method.