Abstract
A new second-order, hybrid, incremental projection method for time-depend\-ent incompressible viscous flow is introduced in this work. The hybrid finite element/finite-volume algorithm circumvents the usual div-stability constraints, i.e., does not require explicit treatment of troublesome pressure modes using Rhie-Chow interpolation or a pressure-stabilized Petrov-Galerkin formulation. The use of a co-velocity and high-resolution advection scheme with consistent edge-based treatment of viscous/diffusive terms yields a robust algorithm for a broad spectrum of incompressible flows. The new flow solver is built using the Hydra multiphysics toolkit. The Hydra toolkit is written in C++ and provides a rich suite of fully-parallel components that permit rapid application development, supports multiple discretization techniques, provides I/O interfaces, dynamic run-time load balancing and data migration, and interfaces to scalable popular linear solvers, e.g., in PETSc, and Trilinos. Results for a few cases from the verification and validation suite for the Hydra toolkit are presented to demonstrate the new flow solver capability as relevant to thermal-hydraulics applications on complex meshes. The hybrid incremental projection method presented here is flexible, performant, and extensible to fully-implicit time-integrators, coupled physics, and multiphase flow problems.