ZONAL FINITE-VOLUME COMPUTATIONS OF INCOMPRESSIBLE FLOWS

The paper addresses convection modelling and flow field zoning procedures destined for finite-volume methods for incompressible steady-state flows with irregular boundaries. A composite oscillation-damping algorithm which is capable of yielding bounded and low diffusive solutions is used to approximate the convection terms of transport equations. To deal with complex geometries, a zonal procedure is introduced into an advanced finite-volume method that uses general non-orthogonal and non-staggered grids. The solution domain is divided into simple subregions each covered by a separate mesh. The flow is solved for concurrently in each of the different zones, and information exchange among the zones is realized through overlapping the grids in the vicinity of the zonal interfaces. The zonal procedure enables the finite-volume method to handle those domains which are extremely difficult to cover with a single grid. Applications to a range of laminar elliptic problems demonstrate the capability of the method for predicting complex flows.