Modified integral equation solution of viscous flows near sharp corners (Q2265898)

Solutions of the biharmonic equation governing steady two dimensional viscous flow of an incompressible Newtonian fluid are obtained by employing a direct biharmonic boundary integral equation (BBIE) method in which Green's theorem is used to reformulate the differential equation as a pair of coupled integral equations. The classical BBIE gives poor convergence in the presence of singularities arising in the solution domain. The rate of convergence is improved dramatically by including the analytic behaviour of the flow in the neighbourhood of the singularities. The modified BBIE effectively ''subtracts out'' this analytic behaviour in terms of a series representation whose coefficients are initially unknown. In this way the modified flow variables are regular thoughout the entire solution domain. Also presented is a method for including the asymptotic nature of the flow when the solution domain is unbounded.