Abstract: | This paper describes one application of the approximate factorization technique to the solution of incompressible steady viscous flow problems in two dimensions. The velocity-pressure formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations written in curvilinear non-orthogonal co-ordinates is adopted. The continuity equation is replaced with one equation for the pressure by means of the artificial compressibility concept to obtain a system parabolic in time. The resulting equations are discretized in space with centred finite differences, and the steady state solution obtained by a time-marching ADI method requiring to solve 3 x 3 block tridiagonal linear systems. An optimized fourth-order artificial dissipation is introduced to damp the numerical instabilities of the artificial compressibility equation and ensure convergence. The resulting solver is applied to the prediction of a wide variety of internal flows, including both streamlined boundaries and sharp corners, and fast convergence and good results obtained for all the configurations investigated. |