This project will address the development of a class of novel and very efficient numerical methods for incompressible flows based on a reformulation of the Navier-Stokes equations that has been proved well-posed and provides boundary conditions for the viscous contribution to pressure in terms of vorticity circulation. The main insight is that the total creation of boundary vorticity can be computed exactly by a commutator between the Laplacian and Helmholtzprojection operators. Moreover, this term is dominated by the viscosity term, hence we can treat it explicitly to gain efficiency and stability. The major advance is that the method can be formulated in standard continuous finite element space, and there is no compatibility condition needed for the velocity and pressure approximation spaces. Hence the standard fast solver can be applied to Navier-Stokes equation directly.
Accurate, efficient simulations of 3D flows in complicated domain are still major challeges for many scientific and engineering problems. The resolution of the flows near physical boundaries is essential to the accurate prediction of the body force such as the lift and drag, shedding of vortex and boundary layer separation. The success of this project will have an important impact on many branches of science and engineering. It will give more accurate predictions of body force which will result in better energy efficiency for transportation related applications. It will provide fast and reliable simulations for scientific research and engineering application.
