Scalable H(div) Consistent Splitting Method for the Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations
Please login to view abstract download link
We consider the numerical solution of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations using a consistent splitting strategy [1], where the velocity and pressure fields are sought in the H(div) and L2 spaces, respectively. The H(div) -conforming formulation of the momentum equation ensures normal continuity, while an additional Leray projection improves discrete mass conservation. The pressure variable is discretized with a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) framework. The use of Raviart-Thomas elements with a complete space of polynomials of degree k in the tangential directions and k+1 in the normal direction, together with DG elements with polynomials of degree k for the pressure, yields L2 convergence of order k for both velocity and pressure fields. Viscous terms are handled using a symmetric interior penalty approach, while explicit and linearly implicit treatments of the nonlinear convective term are considered and their relative merits are evaluated. Additionally, we compare the present method with the DG velocity formulation of [2] to highlight differences in the discretization. The resulting scheme leads to a decoupled algorithmic structure consisting of alternating solves of a pressure Poisson equation with known (extrapolated) velocity on the right-hand side, followed by a vector-valued momentum equation with a given pressure field. By eliminating the need to solve a monolithic coupled system, the method facilitates scalable parallel implementations on modern high-performance computing architectures. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate the convergence behavior of the proposed method, its limitations, and its applicability to challenging benchmark problems in incompressible flow simulation, including comparisons with [2] where relevant. REFERENCES [1] Liu, J., Open and traction boundary conditions for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, J.Comput. Phys., Vol. 228, pp. 7250–7267, 2009. [2] Still, D., Nebulishvili N., Schussnig R., Kormann K., Kronbichler M., A discontinuous Galerkin consistent splitting method for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05919, 2025
