Approximation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations using orthogonal subscale stabilization and pressure segregation on anisotropic finite element meshes

This paper describes a finite element model to solve the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations based on the stabilization with orthogonal subscales and a pressure segregation. The former consists of adding a least-square form of the component orthogonal to the finite element space of the convective and pressure gradient terms; this allows to deal with convection-dominated flows and to use equal velocity-pressure interpolation. The pressure segregation is inspired in fractional step schemes, although the converged solution corresponds to that of a monolithic time integration. Likewise, we put special emphasis on the use of anisotropic grids. In particular, we describe some possible choices for the calculation of the element length that appears in the stabilization parameters and check their behavior in two classical numerical examples. The preconditioning strategy used to solve the resulting algebraic system for very anisotropic meshes is also briefly described. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.