A spectral multidomain method for the numerical simulation of turbulent flows (Q1372012)

The primitive variable formulation of the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in three space dimensions is discretized with a combined Fourier-Legendre spectral method. A semi-implicit pressure correction scheme is used to decouple velocity and pressure. The resulting elliptic problems are solved by a Fourier method in the periodic direction and by a multidomain Legendre collocation method in the two Dirichlet directions. Both iterative and direct version of the so-called projection decomposition method are introduced to separate the equations for the internal nodes from the equations governing the interface unknowns. This technique is based on a Galerkin approximation of the Steklov-Poincaré equation on the interfaces. The exponential convergence of the proposed scheme is demonstrated, and a direct numerical simulation of a turbulent plane channel flow is presented.