A simple and efficient outflow boundary condition for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations

Abstract

Many researchers have proposed special treatments for outlet boundary conditions owing to lack of information at the outlet. Among them, the simplest method requires a large enough computational domain to prevent or reduce numerical errors at the boundaries. However, an efficient method generally requires special treatment to overcome the problems raised by the outlet boundary condition used. For example, mass flux is not conserved and the fluid field is not divergence-free at the outlet boundary. Overcoming these problems requires additional computational cost. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient outflow boundary condition for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, aiming to reduce the computational domain for simulating flow inside a long channel in the streamwise direction. The proposed outflow boundary condition is based on the transparent equation, where a weak formulation is used. The pressure boundary condition is derived by using the Navier–Stokes equations and the outlet flow boundary condition. In the numerical algorithm, a staggered marker-and-cell grid is used and temporal discretization is based on a projection method. The intermediate velocity boundary condition is consistently adopted to handle the velocity–pressure coupling. Characteristic numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the proposed numerical scheme. Furthermore, the agreement of computational results from small and large domains suggests that our proposed outflow boundary condition can significantly reduce computational domain sizes.

Keywords

• Inflow–outflow boundary condition
• marker-and-cell mesh
• incompressible Navier–Stokes equations
• projection method