SYSTEMATIC COMPARISON OF FINITE-VOLUME CALCULATION METHODS WITH STAGGERED AND NONSTAGGERED GRID ARRANGEMENTS

Abstract

This article presents a detailed comparison of two finite-volume calculation methods for incompressible flows in complex geometries, one with a staggered grid arrangement and the other with a nonstaggered grid arrangement. The relative performance of the two schemes is examined through applications to test problems. Several numerical experiments are performed, changing the numerical grids and the flow nonlinearity. The results of these numerical experiments show that the staggered grid-based method generally reaches the grid-independent solutions earlier. However, both schemes result in nearly the same converged solutions when the numerical grids are properly refined.