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

This article presents a detailed comparison of two finite-volume calcu lation methods for incompressible flows in complex geometries, one wit h a staggered grid arrangement and the other with a nonstaggered grid arrangement. The relative performance of the two schemes is examined t hrough applications to test problems. Several numerical experiments ar e performed, changing the numerical grids and the flow nonlinearity. T he 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.