Comparison of three different numerical schemes for 2D steady incompressible lid-driven cavity flow

Abstract

In this study, a numerical solution of 2D steady incompressible lid-driven cavity flow is presented. Three different numerical schemes were employed to make a comparison on the practicality of the methods. An alternating direction implicit scheme for the vorticity-stream function formulation, explicit and implicit schemes for the primitive variable formulation of governing Navier-Stokes equations were attempted. A fairly fine uniform grid was adopted for all the cases after a technical procedure was applied to come up with the proper mesh size that would make the solution roughly independent of mesh quality. The solutions obtained for different Reynolds numbers are presented and compared. Superiority of numerical approaches was investigated and compared to benchmark solutions available in the literature. Based on the results of the present research, it can be claimed that explicit scheme used for primitive variable formulation can be only half the way (as in <em>R_e</em>=2500 for explicit to <em>R</em>_e=5000 for ADI and implicit schemes) as successful as the other two numerical methods due to its relative simplicity.