A natural extension of the conventional finite volume method into polygonal unstructured meshes for CFD application (Q1913065)

A new general cell-centered solution procedure based upon the conventional control or finite volume (\(FV)\) approach has been developed for numerical heat transfer and fluid flow which encompasses both structured and unstructured meshes for any kind of mixed polygon cell. Unlike conventional \(FV\) methods for structured and block structured meshes and both \(FV\) and \(FE\) methods for unstructured meshes, the irregular control volume (ICV) method does not require the shape of the element or cell to be predefined because it simply exploits the concept of fluxes across cell faces. That is, the ICV method enables meshes employing mixtures of triangular, quadrilateral, and any other higher order polygonal cells to be exploited using a single solution procedure. The new ICV formulation is benchmarked using two standard computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems, i.e., the moving lid cavity and the natural convection driven cavity.