A consistent direct discretization scheme on Cartesian grids for convective and conjugate heat transfer

A new discretization scheme on Cartesian grids, namely, a “consistent direct discretization scheme”, is proposed for solving incompressible flows with convective and conjugate heat transfer around a solid object. The Navier-Stokes and the pressure Poisson equations are discretized directly even in the immediate vicinity of a solid boundary with the aid of the consistency between the face-velocity and the pressure gradient. From verifications in fundamental flow problems, the present method is found to significantly improve the accuracy of the velocity and the wall shear stress. It is also confirmed that the numerical results are less sensitive to the Courant number owing to the consistency between the velocity and pressure fields. The concept of the consistent direct discretization scheme is also explored for the thermal field; the energy equations for the fluid and solid phases are discretized directly while satisfying the thermal relations that should be valid at their interface. It takes different forms depending on the thermal boundary conditions: Dirichlet (isothermal) and Neumann (adiabatic/iso-heat-flux) boundary conditions for convective heat transfer and a fluid-solid thermal interaction for conjugate heat transfer. The validity of these discretizations is assessed by comparing the simulated results with analytical solutions for the respective thermal boundary conditions, and it is confirmed that the present schemes also show high accuracy for the thermal field. A significant improvement for the conjugate heat transfer problems is that the second-order spatial accuracy and numerical stability are maintained even under severe conditions of near-practical physical properties for the fluid and solid phases.