The LS-STAG method: A new immersed boundary/level-set method for the computation of incompressible viscous flows in complex moving geometries with good conservation properties

This paper concerns the development of a new Cartesian grid/immersed boundary (IB) method for the computation of incompressible viscous flows in two-dimensional irregular geometries. In IB methods, the computational grid is not aligned with the irregular boundary, and of upmost importance for accuracy and stability is the discretization in cells which are cut by the boundary, the so-called "cut-cells". In this paper, we present a new IB method, called the LS-STAG method, which is based on the MAC method for staggered Cartesian grids and where the irregular boundary is sharply represented by its level-set function. This implicit representation of the immersed boundary enables us to calculate efficiently the geometry parameters of the cut-cells. We have achieved a novel discretization of the fluxes in the cut-cells by enforcing the strict conservation of total mass, momentum and kinetic energy at the discrete level. Our discretization in the cut-cells is consistent with the MAC discretization used in Cartesian fluid cells, and has the ability to preserve the five-point Cartesian structure of the stencil, resulting in a highly computationally efficient method. The accuracy and robustness of our method is assessed on canonical flows at low to moderate Reynolds number: Taylor-Couette flow, flows past a circular cylinder, including the case where the cylinder has forced oscillatory rotations. Finally, we will extend the LS-STAG method to the handling of moving immersed boundaries and present some results for the transversely oscillating cylinder flow in a free-stream. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.