Performance of the finite volume method in solving regularised Bingham flows: inertia effects in the lid-driven cavity flow

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the finite volume method with Papanastasiou regularisation for simulating inertial Bingham flows in a lid-driven cavity, highlighting its strengths and limitations across different flow parameters.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing inertial effects in Bingham flows using a finite volume approach with regularisation, and assesses its accuracy and challenges.

Findings

The method performs well at low Bingham numbers.

Regularisation introduces errors and complicates yield surface detection.

Multigrid and grid refinement improve solution accuracy.

Abstract

We extend our recent work on the creeping flow of a Bingham fluid in a lid-driven cavity, to the study of inertial effects, using a finite volume method and the Papanastasiou regularisation of the Bingham constitutive model [J. Rheology 31 (1987) 385-404]. The finite volume method used belongs to a very popular class of methods for solving Newtonian flow problems, which use the SIMPLE algorithm to solve the discretised set of equations, and have matured over the years. By regularising the Bingham constitutive equation it is easy to extend such a solver to Bingham flows since all that this requires is to modify the viscosity function. This is a tempting approach, since it requires minimum programming effort and makes available all the existing features of the mature finite volume solver. On the other hand, regularisation introduces a parameter which controls the error in addition to the grid spacing, and makes it difficult to locate the yield surfaces. Furthermore, the equations become stiffer and more difficult to solve, while the discontinuity at the yield surfaces causes large truncation errors. The present work attempts to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of such a method by applying it to the lid-driven cavity problem for a range of Bingham and Reynolds numbers (up to 100 and 5000 respectively). By employing techniques such as multigrid, local grid refinement, and an extrapolation procedure to reduce the effect of the regularisation parameter on the calculation of the yield surfaces (Liu et al. J. Non-Newtonian Fluid Mech. 102 (2002) 179-191), satisfactory results are obtained, although the weaknesses of the method become more noticeable as the Bingham number is increased.