A multidomain multigrid pseudospectral method for incompressible flows

Pseudospectral method has the merit of high accuracy and the defects of simple geometry suitability and low computational efficiency. To remedy the two defects, a multidomain multigrid Chebyshev pseudospectral method is proposed and validated through the numerical solution of two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in the primitive variable formulation. To facilitate the implementation of the multidomain multigrid method, the IP_N-IP_N method is utilized to approximate the velocity and pressure with the same degree of Chebyshev polynomials within each subdomain, and an interface/boundary condensation method is developed to implement the pseudospectral operators of multigrid at the interface/boundary of subdomains. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are first validated by numerical solutions of the lid-driven cavity problem. The numerical results are in good agreement with the benchmark solutions, and the speeding up of multigrid is 4–9 compared against the single grid. Then the capability of the proposed method for even more complex geometries with a close/open boundary is demonstrated by numerical solutions of several typical problems. The proposed method is quite generic and can be extended to the high accuracy and efficiency solution of three-dimensional incompressible/compressible, unsteady/steady fluid flows and heat transfer problems.