Computing flows on general three-dimensional nonsmooth staggered grids

The classical staggered scheme for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equatio ns is generalized from Cartesian grids to general boundary-fitted structure d grids in three dimensions. The resulting discretization is coordinate-inv ariant. The unknowns are the pressure and the contravariant volume flux com ponents. The grid can be strongly nonuniform and nonorthogonal. The smoothn ess properties of the coordinate mapping are carefully taken into account. As a result, the accuracy on rough grids is found to be at least as good as for typical finite element and nonstaggered finite volume schemes. (C) 199 9 Academic Press.