A Study of Viscous Flux Formulations for a p-Multigrid Spectral Volume Navier Stokes Solver

In this paper, we improve the Navier–Stokes flow solver developed by Sun et al. based on the spectral volume method (SV) in the following two aspects: the development of a more efficient implicit/p-multigrid solution approach, and the use of a new viscous flux formula. An implicit preconditioned LU-SGS p-multigrid method developed for the spectral difference (SD) Euler solver by Liang is adopted here. In the original SV solver, the viscous flux was computed with a local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) type approach. In this study, an interior penalty approach is developed and tested for both the Laplace and Navier–Stokes equations. In addition, the second method of Bassi and Rebay (also known as BR2 approach) is also implemented in the SV context, and also tested. Their convergence properties are studied with the implicit BLU-SGS approach. Fourier analysis revealed some interesting advantages for the penalty method over the LDG method. A convergence speedup of up to 2-3 orders is obtained with the implicit method. The convergence was further enhanced by employing a p-multigrid algorithm. Numerical simulations were performed using all the three viscous flux formulations and were compared with existing high order simulations (or in some cases, analytical solutions). The penalty and the BR2 approaches displayed higher accuracy than the LDG approach. In general, the numerical results are very promising and indicate that the approach has a great potential for 3D flow problems.