AN IMPROVED CONTROL VOLUME FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD IFOR HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER, AND FOR FLUID FLOW USING EQUAL-ORDER VELOCITY-PRESSURE INTERPOLATION

Abstract

A new control volume-based finite-element method for the solution of heat, mass, and momentum transfer equations is presented. As compared with other similar methods, the new feature of the proposed method lies in the choice of the particular shape function that accounts explicitly for the source terms in the transport equations. The use of such a shape function for interpolating the velocity components while discretizing the continuity equation leads, very naturally, to a consistent equal-order formulation that permits velocity and pressure to be computed at all the grid points in the domain. The method is applied to a number of test problems, and in all cases the results are found to be more accurate than those obtained by its predecessors.