A compact RBF-FD based meshless method for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations

Abstract: Meshless methods for solving fluid and fluid-structure problems have become a promising alternative to the finite volume and finite element methods. In this paper, a mesh-free computational method based on radial basis functions in a finite difference mode (RBF-FD) has been developed for the incompressible Navier–Stokes (NS) equations in stream function vorticity form. This compact RBF-FD formulation generates sparse coefficient matrices, and hence advancing solutions will in time be of comparatively lower cost. The spatial discretization of the incompressible NS equations is done using the RBF-FD method and the temporal discretization is achieved by explicit Euler time-stepping and the Crank– Nicholson method. A novel ghost node strategy is used to incorporate the no-slip boundary conditions. The performance of the RBF-FD scheme with the ghost node strategy is validated against a variety of benchmark problems, including a model fluid–structure interaction problem, and is found to be in a good agreement with the existing results. In addition, a higher-order RBF-FD scheme (which uses ideas from Hermite interpolation) is then proposed for solving the NS equations