Adaptive wavelet simulation of weakly compressible flow in a channel with a suddenly expanded section

Abstract

We present an adaptive multiresolution simulation method for computing weakly compressible flow bounded by solid walls of arbitrary shape, using a finite volume (FV) approach coupled with wavelets for grid adaptation. A volume penalization method is employed to compute the flow in the Cartesian geometry and to impose the boundary conditions. A dynamical adaption strategy to advance both the locally refined grid and the flow in time uses biorthogonal wavelet transforms at each time step. We assess the quality and efficiency of the method for a two-dimensional flow in a periodic channel with a suddenly expanded section. The results are compared with a reference flow obtained by a non-adaptive FV simulation on a uniform grid. It is shown that the adaptive method allows for substantial reduction of CPU time and memory, while preserving the time evolution of the velocity field obtained with the non-adaptive simulation.