Stability Analysis of Galerkin/Runge-Kutta Navier-Stokes Discretisations on Unstructured Grids

Abstract

This paper presents a timestep stability analysis for a class of discretisations applied to the linearised form of the Navier-Stokes equations on a 3D domain with periodic boundary conditions. Using a suitable definition of the `perturbation energy' it is shown that the energy is monotonically decreasing for both the original p.d.e. and the semi-discrete system of o.d.e.'s arising from a Galerkin discretisation on a tetrahedral grid. Using recent theoretical results concerning algebraic and generalised stability, sufficient stability limits are obtained for both global and local timesteps for fully discrete algorithms using Runge-Kutta time integration.