A CHARACTERISTIC-BASED METHOD FOR INCOMPRESSIBLE FLOWS

A new characteristic-based method for the solution of the 2D laminar incompressible Navier-Stokes equation is presented. For coupling the continuity and momentum equations, the artificial compressibility formulation is employed. The primitives variables (pressure and velocity components) are defined as functions of their values on the characteristics. The primitives variables on the characteristics are calculated by an upwind differencing scheme based on the sign of the local eignevalue of the Jacobian matrix of the convective fluxes. The upwind scheme uses interpolation formulae of third-order accuracy. The time discretization is obtained by the explicit Runge-Kutta method. Validation of the characteristics-based method is performed on two different cases: the flow in a simple cascade and the flow over a backward-facing step.