A nodal-based implementation of a stabilized Finite Element Method for Incompressible Flow Problems

Abstract

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, a stabilized finite element method for the incompressible Navier-Stokes is presented, and several numerical experiments are conducted to check its performance. This method is able to deal with all the instabilities that the standard Galerkin method presents, namely, the pressure instability, the instability arising in convection dominated situations and also the less popular instabilities found when the Navier-Stokes equations have a dominant Coriolis force, or there is a dominant absorption term arising from the small permeability of the medium where the flow takes place.

The second objective is to describe a nodal-based implementation of the finite element formulation introduced. This implementation is based on an a priori calculation of the integrals appearing in the formulation and then the construction of the matrix approximations, this matrix and this vector can be constructed directly for each nodal point, without the need to loop over element and thus making the calculations much faster. In order to be able to do this, all the variables have to be defined at the nodes of the finite element mesh, not on the elements. This is also so for the stabilization parameters of the formulation. However, doing this given rise to questions regarding the consistency and the conservation properties of the final scheme that are addressed in this paper.