Entropically damped form of artificial compressibility for explicit simulation of incompressible flow

An alternative artificial compressibility (AC) scheme is proposed to allow the explicit simulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes (INS) equations. Traditional AC schemes rely on an artificial equation of state that gives the pressure as a function of the density, which is known to enforce isentropic behavior. This behavior is nonideal, especially in viscously dominated flows. An alternative, the entropically damped artificial compressibility (EDAC) method, is proposed that employs a thermodynamic constraint to damp the pressure oscillations inherent to AC methods. The EDAC method converges to the INS in the low-Mach limit, and is consistent in both the low- and high-Reynolds-number limits, unlike standard AC schemes. The proposed EDAC method is discretized using a simple finite-difference scheme and is compared with traditional AC schemes as well as the lattice-Boltzmann method for steady lid-driven cavity flow and a transient traveling-wave problem. The EDAC method is shown to be beneficial in damping pressure and velocity-divergence oscillations when performing transient simulations. The EDAC method follows a similar derivation to the kinetically reduced local Navier-Stokes (KRLNS) method [Borok et al., Phys. Rev. E 76, 066704 (2007)]; however, the EDAC method does not rely on the grand potential as the thermodynamic variable, but instead uses the more common pressure-velocity system. Additionally, a term neglected in the KRLNS is identified that is important for accurately approximating the INS equations.