The conventional segregated finite element formulation produces a small and simple matrix at each step than in an integrated formulation. And the memory and cost requirements of computations are significantly reduced because the pressure equation for ...
The conventional segregated finite element formulation produces a small and simple matrix at each step than in an integrated formulation. And the memory and cost requirements of computations are significantly reduced because the pressure equation for the mass conservation of the Navier-Stokes equations is constructed only once if the mesh is fixed. However, segregated finite element formulation solves Poisson equation of elliptic type so that it always needs a pressure boundary condition along a boundary even when physical information on pressure is not provided. On the other hand, the conventional integrated finite element formulation in which the governing equations are simultaneously treated has an advantage over a segregated formulation in the sense that it can give a more robust convergence behavior because all variables are implicitly combined. Further it needs a very small number of iterations to achieve convergence. However, the saddle-point-type matrix (SPTM) in the integrated formulation is assembled and preconditioned every time step, so that it needs a large memory and computing time. Therefore, we newly proposed the P2P1 semi-segregation formulation. In order to utilize the fact that the pressure equation is assembled and preconditioned only once in the segregated finite element formulation, a fixed symmetric SPTM has been obtained for the continuity constraint of the present semi-segregation finite element formulation. The momentum equation in the semi-segregation finite element formulation will be separated from the continuity equation so that the saddle-point-type matrix is assembled and preconditioned only once during the whole computation as long as the mesh does not change. For a comparison of the CPU time, accuracy and condition number between the two methods, they have been applied to the well-known benchmark problem. It is shown that the newly proposed semi-segregation finite element formulation performs better than the conventional integrated finite element formulation in terms of the computation time.