A fully conservative second-order finite difference scheme for incompressible flow on nonuniform grids (Q1604449)

The authors propose a second-order accurate difference discretization of incompressible Navier-Stokes equations that discretely conserves mass, momentum and kinetic energy in space and time. The proposed method is thus completely free of numerical dissipation and potentially well suited for direct numerical simulations or large eddy simulations of turbulent flows. The method uses a staggered arrangement of velocity and pressure on a structured Cartesian grid, and retains its discrete conservation properties for both uniform and nonuniform grid spacing. The present fully conservative scheme achieves turbulent flow solution in the entire range of computational time steps investigated. The presented results differ significantly from those reported by \textit{H. Choi} and \textit{P. Moin} [J. Comput. Phys. 113, No.~1, 1--4 (1994; Zbl 0807.76051)] who observed significant discrepancies in turbulence statistics above \(\Delta t^+=0.4\), and the complete laminarization of the flow at and above \(\Delta t^+=1.6\).