Local radial basis function collocation method for solving thermo-driven fluid-flow problems with free surface

This paper explores the application of the meshless Local Radial Basis Function Collocation Method (LRBFCM) for the solution of coupled heat transfer and fluid flow problems with a free surface. The method employs the representation of temperature, velocity and pressure fields on overlapping five-noded sub-domains through collocation by using Radial Basis Functions (RBFs). This simple representation is then used to compute the first and second derivatives of the fields from the respective derivatives of the RBFs. The energy and momentum equations are solved through explicit time integration scheme. For numerical efficiency, the Artificial Compressibility Method (ACM) with Characteristic Based Split (CBS) technique is firstly adopted to solve the pressure–velocity coupled equations. The performance of the method is assessed based on solving the classical two-dimensional De Vahl Davis steady natural convection benchmark problem with an upper free surface for Rayleigh number ranged from 103 to 105 and Prandtl number equals to 0.71.