COMPARISON OF THE PISO, SIMPLER, AND SIMPLEC ALGORITHMS FOR THE TREATMENT OF THE PRESSURE-VELOCITY COUPLING IN STEADY FLOW PROBLEMS

Abstract

The performance of the PISO, SIMPLER, and SIMPLEC algorithms for the treatment of the pressure-velocity coupling in steady flow problems is examined by comparing the computational effort required to obtain the same level of convergence in four test problems. For problems in which the momentum equation is not coupled to a scalar variable the PISO algorithm is superior, but when the scalar variable is strongly coupled to the momentum equation SIMPLER and SIMPLEC exhibit better behavior and reasonable solutions with the PISO algorithm are obtained only for small time steps. Clear superiority of SIMPLER over SIMPLEC or vice versa is not observed, although the iterative formulations of these two algorithms exhibit more robust behavior than the corresponding time-marching formulations.