A symmetry-preserving Cartesian grid method for computing a viscous flow past a circular cylinder

This article deals with a numerical method for solving the unsteady, incompressible Navier–Stokes equations in domains with arbitrarily-shaped boundaries, where the boundary is represented using the Cartesian grid approach. We introduce a novel cut-cell discretization which preserves the spectral properties of convection and diffusion. Here, convection is discretized by a skew-symmetric operator and diffusion is approximated by a symmetric, positive-definite coefficient matrix. Such a symmetry-preserving discretization conserves the kinetic energy (if the dissipation is turned off) and is stable on any grid. The method is successfully tested for an incompressible, unsteady flow around a circular cylinder at $\mathit{Re}=100$. To cite this article: R. Verstappen, M. Dröge, C. R. Mecanique 333 (2005).