Sub-iteration leads to accuracy and stability enhancements of semi-implicit schemes for the Navier–Stokes equations

We present an iterative semi-implicit scheme for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, which is stable at CFL numbers well above the nominal limit. We have implemented this scheme in conjunction with spectral discretizations, which suffer from serious time step limitations at very high resolution. However, the approach we present is general and can be adopted with finite element and finite difference discretizations as well. Specifically, at each time level, the nonlinear convective term and the pressure boundary condition – both of which are treated explicitly in time – are updated using fixed-point iteration and Aitken relaxation. Eigenvalue analysis shows that this scheme is unconditionally stable for Stokes flows while numerical results suggest that the same is true for steady Navier–Stokes flows as well. This finding is also supported by error analysis that leads to the proper value of the relaxation parameter as a function of the flow parameters. In unsteady flows, second- and third-order temporal accuracy is obtained for the velocity field at CFL number 5–14 using analytical solutions. Systematic accuracy, stability, and cost comparisons are presented against the standard semi-implicit method and a recently proposed fully-implicit scheme that does not require Newton’s iterations. In addition to its enhanced accuracy and stability, the proposed method requires the solution of symmetric only linear systems for which very effective preconditioners exist unlike the fully-implicit schemes.