Time Stepping for Vectorial Operator Splitting

We present a fully implicit finite difference method for the unsteady incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. It is based on the one-step θ-method for discretization in time and a special coordinate splitting (called vectorial operator splitting) for efficiently solving the nonlinear stationary problems for the solution at each new time level. The resulting system is solved in a fully coupled approach that does not require a boundary condition for the pressure. A staggered arrangement of velocity and pressure on a structured Cartesian grid combined with the fully implicit treatment of the boundary conditions help to preserve properties of the differential operators and thus lead to excellent stability of the overall algorithm. The convergence properties of the method are confirmed via numerical experiments