GENERALIZED STOKES EIGENFUNCTIONS - A NEW TRIAL BASIS FOR THE SOLUTION OF INCOMPRESSIBLE NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS

The present study focuses on the solution of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in general, non-separable domains, and employs a Galerkin projection of divergence-free vector functions as a trial basis. This basis is obtained from the solution of a generalized constrained Stokes eigen-problem in the domain of interest. Faster convergence can be achieved by constructing a singular Stokes eigen-problem in which the Stokes operator is modified to include a variable coefficient which vanishes at the domain boundaries. The convergence properties of such functions are advantageous in a least squares sense and are shown to produce significantly better approximations to the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations in post-critical states where unsteadiness characterizes the flowfield. Solutions for the eigen-systems are efficiently accomplished using a combined Lanczos-Uzawa algorithm and spectral element discretizations. Results are presented for different simulations using these global spectral trial basis on non-separable and multiply-connected domains. It is confirmed that faster convergence is obtained using the singular eigen-expansions in approximating stationary Navier-Stokes solutions in general domains. It is also shown that 100-mode expansions of time-dependent solutions based on the singular Stokes eigenfunctions are sufficient to accurately predict the dynamics of flows in such domains, including Hopf bifurcations, intermittency, and details of flow structures. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.