Computers & Fluids 95 (2014) 4048

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Computers & Fluids

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / c o m p fl u i d

A spectral method for the triangular cavity ow

Arjun Jagannathan a,, Ranjith Mohan b, Manhar Dhanak a
a
b

Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036, TN, India

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 17 December 2012
Received in revised form 19 January 2014
Accepted 6 February 2014
Available online 22 February 2014
Keywords:
Lid driven cavity
Spectral collocation
Coordinate mapping
Inuence matrix method

a b s t r a c t
We describe the use of a spectral collocation method to compute the characteristics of incompressible,
viscous ow in a lid driven right triangular cavity with wall motion away from the right angle. First,
the 2-D GaussLobatto grid on the square 1; 1  1; 1 is mapped to a triangular domain by means
of a singular mapping. A singularity subtraction technique is used to account for the most singular terms
of the asymptotic expansions near the top corners of the ow. The unsteady NavierStokes equations in
the vorticitystreamfunction formulation are then solved in this transformed grid using an inuence
matrix technique. A third order Adams Bashforth/Backward differentiation method appears to provide
excellent numerical stability for the scheme and also permits a larger critical time step. Detailed characteristics of the ow and comparisons with published results are presented.
2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Flows in closed geometries have for long attracted the attention
of CFD practitioners and numerical analysts. Shankar and Deshpande [19] note that the importance of cavity ows is in the study of
basic uid mechanics. Complex phenomena including corner eddies, instability and transition to turbulence occur naturally in
these ows. The eddy structures found in driven cavity ows provide insight about such structures in applications as diverse as drag
reducing riblets and mixing cavities used to synthesize ne polymeric composites Zumbrunnen et al. [21].
Specically, the ow in a square cavity has become a benchmark problem for testing and validating CFD codes. The simplicity
of the geometry and unambiguous nature of the boundary conditions make it an attractive choice as a framework in which detailed
comparisons can be made between different numerical, experimental and theoretical studies. Among numerous studies for this
problem found in the literature are the well known computations
of Ghia et al. [7], Schreiber and Keller [17] and Botella and
Peyret [2] who have presented benchmark spectral results for this
problem. Published results for the 2-D square cavity ow generally
agree well for a wide range of Reynolds numbers. However, there is

Corresponding author. Present address: Arjun Jagannathan, Scripps Institution

of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. Tel.:
+1 5616671899.
E-mail addresses: agjagann@ucsd.edu (A. Jagannathan), ranjith.m@iitm.ac.in
(R. Mohan), dhanak@fau.edu (M. Dhanak).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compuid.2014.02.003
0045-7930/ 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

lack of agreement among researchers over the maximum Reynolds

number for which steady 2-D ows exist.
Flows in non-rectangular cavities while being of nearly as much
practical interest as their rectangular counterpart have not been
studied as extensively. One possible reason for this is the inherent
difculties in computing the ow eld in complex domains using a
regular grid system Gaskell et al. [6]. McQuain et al. [13] studied
the ow in a trapezoidal cavity using nite differences with special
treatment at the corners. Jyotsna and Vanka [11] used a multigrid
method to solve the particular problem of driven ow in an isosceles cavity of stagnant corner angle 28. Their results are in broad
agreement with the theoretical results of Moffatt [14] for viscous
ow near a sharp corner. Gaskell et al. [6] used a vorticity streamfunction formulation for the triangular cavity ow along with an
analytical specication of vorticity near the singular edges. Flows
in equilateral triangular cavities have been studied by Ribbens
et al. [16], Li and Tang [12] who also considered scalene triangular
cavities using a second-order nite difference discretization. The
former solved the NavierStokes equations with a fourth order
streamfunction formulation and a Newton-like iteration whereas
the latter used the vorticitystreamfunction formulation. Both
these studies used a transformation approach so that the computational region was a right triangle.
More recently, Erturk and Gokcol [5] have obtained ne-grid
solutions of high Reynolds number ow in triangular cavities of
different shapes, including for the case considered in the present
study. They computed steady state solutions by solving the vorticity streamfunction equations using the successive over-relaxation
(SOR) method. Finally, Ahmed and Kuhlmann [1] have used the

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A. Jagannathan et al. / Computers & Fluids 95 (2014) 4048

nite element method with a primitive variable formulation to

investigate the ow in right triangular cavities with wall motion
along a straight edge away from the right angle. Here we investigate this latter problem using a spectral method. To the best of
the authors knowledge, spectral simulations have not been previously performed for ow in a triangular cavity.
2. Flow considerations
The triangular domain and ow considered in this study are
sketched in Fig. 1. The ow domain is an isosceles right triangular
cavity with the top wall translating away from the right angle. The
boundary of the domain is denoted by C. It is worth noting that unlike for a rectangular cavity, the ow in this case is not symmetric
with respect to the direction of translation of the lid. In fact, the
two cases have distinctly different vortex structures as can be seen
in Erturk and Gokcol [5].
It is reasonable to take the characteristic length scale for this
ow to be the length of the driving lid. The characteristic velocity
scale is the velocity of translation of the lid. We therefore dene
the Reynolds number, Re, of the ow based on these length and
velocity scales. The non-dimensional, incompressible Navier
Stokes in the vorticitystreamfunction formulation are

@x
@x
@x
1 @2x @2x
u
v

2
@t
@x
@y Re @x2
@y

r w x
@w
u
;
@y

2:1a
2:1b

@w

@x

1
1  x1 y 1
4
1
g y  1
2
n

3:1a
3:1b

The inverse mapping is given by:

square 1; 1  1; 1 and the domain of interest. This is often

complicated and can result in ill-conditioned spectral operators.
Sherwin and Karniadakis [20] introduced a mapping which
maps the square 1; 1  1; 1 to a right triangle. This is a singular mapping, taking a side of the square to a triangle vertex. Heinrichs and Loch [10] used a modied form of this mapping to solve
the Poisson problem with Dirichlet boundary conditions in a triangular domain using the Chebyshev pseudospectral method. They
further showed that nite difference preconditioning can be applied to construct an efcient iterative solver. They were also able
to successfully implement a domain decomposition scheme with
patching of triangular and rectangular domains. In the present
study we use this mapping to solve the resultant transformed system of equations on the square using the inuence matrix method.
This mapping is shown in Fig. 2. The triangular domain
fn; g : 0 6 n 6 1; 1 6 g 6 0; n g P 0g is mapped to the square
domain fx; y : j x j6 1; j y j6 1g by means of the following
transformation:

2:1c

The boundary conditions are no-slip and no normal ow at the solid

boundaries, as indicated in Fig. 1.

2n  1
1
g1
y 2g 1

3:2b

This transformation takes the side CD in Fig. 2a to the vertex G

in Fig. 2b. The mapped grid is consequently extremely dense in the
neighbourhood of this point. The mapping is singular at g 1.
The transformed partial derivatives for a general function ux; y
are:

3. Strategy for spectral schemes on triangles

un
The well known difculty of spectral collocation methods is
that they are not immediately applicable to problems in domains
of arbitrary shape. This is due to the fact that it is possible to employ the standard Chebyshev-GaussLobatto nodes in both directions (for 2-D problems) only if the domain is the square
1; 1  1; 1. More generally, they can be applied to any rectangle by an afne transformation. However, the extension to complex
geometries is not immediate. Methods have been devised to overcome this limitation: for example, by using domain decomposition
techniques. Another possibility is to use a mapping between the

3:2a

g1

unn

ux

3:3a

2

g1
n1

ug 2
ugg 4

uxx

g 12

n  12
g 1

3:3b

ux 2uy

uxx  8

3:3c

n1
g 1

uxy 4

n1
g 13

ux 4uyy

3:3d

Using this transformation, the Laplacian operator in the triangular

domain is given by:

(

Du

)
2
2
n  12
n1
n1
uxx  8
4
uxy 4
ux 4uyy
g1
g 12
g 13
g 14
3:4

4. Singularity subtraction

Fig. 1. Schematic of ow in an isosceles right triangular cavity with moving lid

translating away from the rectangular edge.

For the classical lid driven cavity problem which we consider, at

the corners E and F, the vorticity is innite. This singularity implies
that in the neighborhood of E and F, the vorticity is not even continuous, much less smooth. For a nite difference or nite element
discretization, this would affect the solution accuracy only in the
vicinity of the singularities, but owing to the global nature of spectral methods, in a pseudo-spectral scheme, this could potentially
lead to severe inaccuracy in the global solution.
One way to handle the singularity is to replace the velocity
boundary condition on the driving wall with a regularized velocity
which goes to zero at the corners, thereby ensuring that the vorticity is zero at the corners. Another technique successfully employed

42

A. Jagannathan et al. / Computers & Fluids 95 (2014) 4048

(a)

(b)

Fig. 2. Grid transformation (a) the ChebyshevGaussLobatto grid on the square 1; 1  1; 1; (b) transformed grid on the right triangle.

by Botella and Peyret [2] is singularity subtraction. The basis for

this technique goes back to Moffatt [14], who rst proposed that
in the Stokes regime, the streamfunction sufciently close to a
sharp corner can be written as an asymptotic expansion in terms
of powers of r, the distance from the corner. Gupta et al. [8] extended this technique for low Reynolds number ows. We adopt
this strategy here, subtracting a nite number of terms from the
asymptotic solution at the singular corners, which yields a more
regular problem that can be efciently handled by a spectral
method.
Following Gupta et al. [8,2], in the neighborhood of E and F, we
write the streamfunction, w and vorticity, x as follows:

wP

xP

1
X

rk Rek1 fkP h

k1
1
X

r k2 Rek1 g Pk h

4:1
4:2

k1

where Re is the Reynolds number, P E; F and r; h are the local

polar coordinates.
From the above expressions, it is clear that in the vicinity of the
top corners, the vorticity and its derivative behave as O1=r and
O1=r 2 respectively. For our purposes, we note that subtracting
the rst two terms of the asymptotic expansion is sufcient to
guarantee that the resultant part is continuous and differentiable
at the singular corner. This considerably improves the solution
convergence and accuracy as has been established by Botella and
Peyret [2]. In fact, Schultz et al. [18] were able to achieve excellent
convergence properties for the square cavity ow in the Stokes regime and low to moderate Reynolds numbers by merely accounting for the most singular term of the expansion.
So, we rewrite Eqs. (4.1) and (4.2) as
P

wP rf 1 h r 2 Re f2P h

4:3

xP g P1 h=r Re g P2 h

4:4

It now remains to determine the functions f1P h; f2P h; g P1 h;

for P E; F. These are obtained following the procedure outlined in Gupta et al. [8], where these terms are derived for the singular corners of the square cavity ow. The only difference for a
triangular cavity is a change in boundary conditions which makes
the terms of the expansion at E considerably more cumbersome,
for which reason, we do not include them here. The interested
reader is referred to Moffatt [14] for a general discussion on the
subject of viscous ows near a sharp corner and Gupta et al. [8]
for a detailed derivation of the asymptotic expansion near the singular corners of the square cavity ow.
Let us dene the singular part of the solution as follows
g P2 h

ws wE wF

4:5a

xs xE xF

4:5b

us uE uF

4:5c

vs vE vF

4:5d

Now, the total solution can be written as a superposition of the

singular and regularized parts.

^ ws
ww
^ xs
xx
^ us
uu

4:6a
4:6b

v v^ v s

4:6d

4:6c

^ is adequately regular near the singular corThe behavior of x

ners and therefore lends itself much better to a spectral treatment
employing the vorticitystreamfunction formulation. The inuence matrix method which is used to solve the regularized part
of the solution is described in the next section.
5. The inuence matrix method
The classical difculty of the vorticitystreamfunction formulation is the lack of explicit boundary conditions for the vorticity. The
inuence matrix (IM) method provides an efcient strategy for
overcoming this limitation (Peyret [15, ch 6, p.188]). However,
there is an important difference in the implementation of the IM
method for triangles and rectangles. This is to do with the singularity of the grid transformation, Eqs. (3.1) and (3.2) and will be discussed in this section.
The underlying principle of the IM method relies on the transformation of Eqs. 2.1a, 2.1b and 2.1c to a set of Helmholtz and Poisson problems. The method takes advantage of the linearity of the
Helmholtz and Poisson equations to construct an efcient solution
scheme. With a semi-implicit scheme the vorticitystreamfunction
equations for the regularized portion of the ow are written as:

^ n1 kx
^ n1 gxn ; xn1 ; xn2 ;un ;un1 ;un2 ; v n ; v n1 ; v n2 5:1
r2 x
^ n1 x
^ n1
r2 w

5:2

Note that in Eq. (5.1), g includes contributions from the singular as

well as regularized parts of the solution at previous time levels. The
constant k and the precise form of the function g depend on the
time marching scheme. For the third order Adams Bashforth/
Backward differentiation used in this study, these values can be
computed based on the constants provided in Peyret [15, ch 4,
p.131]. If we denote the boundary of the triangle by C (see Fig. 1),
the boundary conditions for the above problem are given by:

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A. Jagannathan et al. / Computers & Fluids 95 (2014) 4048

^ ws on C
w
^ h  @ n ws on C
@nw

5:3
5:4

where @ n is the normal derivative; h 1 on the top wall and zero

on the other two.
The implementation of the IM method proceeds by decomposing the problem into two parts as given by Eqs. (5.5a) and (5.5b)

^ x
e x

x

5:5a

e w

^w
w

5:5b

The rst problem which has homogeneous boundary conditions is

stated as below:

(
(

e  kx
e g
r2 x
e 0
x

5:6

on C

e x
e
r2 w
e ws
w

  kx
 0
r2 x
 c
x

5:8

on C

 x

r2 w
0
w

5:9

on C

For solving Eq. (5.8), values of vorticity, c on the boundary are required. We obtain this by making use of the boundary condition

for the normal derivative of w. This is done by rst considering x
 under the form given by Eqs. (5.10a) and (5.10b).
and w


x

N
X

f x

5:10a


w

N
X

f w

5:10b

where N is the number of boundary points where the vorticity

needs to be computed. Now the set of linear problems that are to
 , 1; 2; . . . ; N are set up so that the val and w
be solved to nd x
ues of f are the same as the vorticity values on the boundary, c.
These problems are:

(
(

  kx
 0
r2 x
 jam d;m
x

5:11

on C

 x

r2 w
j 0
w
am

Nx

Ny

HFD1 H

58
81
101
134

82
114
142
188

2.018e + 011
3.437e + 012
2.251e + 013
2.45e + 014

2.859
3.042
3.21
3.108

Table 3
Condition numbers for the inuence matrix for Re 1000.
Nx

Ny

RMC

58
81
101
134

82
114
142
188

35.06
49.03
67.33
53.54

5.82
7.025
8.23
7.345

5:7

on C

Since g is a function of values of ow variables at three previous

e needs to be computed at each time step. The second
time levels, x
problem is homogeneous with non-homogeneous boundary conditions. Most of the computations for this second problem need be
performed only once at the preprocessing stage. The problem is as
follows

Table 2
Condition numbers for the Helmholtz operator with and without preconditioning for
Re 1000.

5:12

on C

N
X
 j h  @ n w
e  @ n ws j
f @ n w
am
am

5:13

with 1 6 m 6 N. That is, N number of such equations can be obtained and the system of equations can be expressed in matrix form
as

MN E

5:14

M, which is a square matrix of order N is called the inuence matrix.

Regarding the value of N, if we were to include all the collocation
points except the corners, we would end up with a singular matrix
as proved in Ehrenstein and Peyret [4]. They further show that in order to get a non-singular inuence matrix, it is necessary to remove
4 points from the boundary. Bwemba and Pasquetti [3] further describe the rules to be followed in choosing these 4 points. For the
present case, there is also the issue of dealing with the mathematical singularity induced by the mapping at the vertex G appropriately. All partial derivatives as well as the Laplacian operator are
undened at this point (refer Eqs. (3.3) and (3.4)), and in the actual
domain of implementation (the square ABCD), all these quantities
are undened on an entire side CD. So, in the construction of our
inuence matrix, we disregard the entire lower boundary besides
removing two points, one adjacent to each corner, from the top
boundary. Our resultant inuence matrix is non-singular and well
conditioned as is demonstrated in Section 6 (see Table 3).
Removing the lower boundary points from the inuence matrix
necessitates an alternative treatment of the boundary condition at
G. The vorticity at the stagnant corner can be determined based on
the analytical insight provided in Moffatt [14]. For a stagnant corner with angle between walls equal to 45, this is easily found to be
zero. With singularity subtraction implemented, this means that

^ jG xs jG
x

where m is the index of the point am on the boundary C. It is worth are solved only
 and w
while to note that the above equations for x
once at the pre-processing stage. Now the no-slip condition, Eq.
(5.4) can be written as

Table 1
Condition numbers for the Laplacian operators with and without preconditioning.
Nx

Ny

LFD 1 L

58
81
101
134

82
114
142
188

2.136e + 014
3.585e + 015
4.282e + 016
1.232e + 018

6.733
7.27
7.595
7.973

^ jG is the regularized component of the vorticity at the corwhere x

ner G and xs jG , the singular component dened in Eq. (4.5b).
Solving Eq. (5.14), we obtain the boundary values of the vortic . It is now
ity which can be substituted in Eq. (5.8) to solve for x
possible to solve the system of equations given by Eqs. (5.1) and
^
^ and w.
(5.2) with boundary conditions available for x

^ c on C
x

5:15

^ ws
w

5:16

on C

The regularized solution computed using the inuence matrix

method as described above is then added to the singular part
(Eqs. (4.6a)(4.6d)) to get the actual solution.

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A. Jagannathan et al. / Computers & Fluids 95 (2014) 4048

Table 4
Grid convergence of characteristics of rst three vortices of the ow for Re 1000.
Nx

Ny

Primary

Secondary

Tertiary

wp np ; gp

xp

ws ns ; gs

xs

wt nt ; gt

xt

58

82

0.05322
(0.3906, 0.1320)

7.0214

0.00746
(0.7878, 0.2903)

0.9250

0.000010
(0.9040, 0.7555)

0.0080

81

114

0.05320
(0.3905, 0.1319)

7.0069

0.00752
(0.7873, 0.2920)

0.9032

0.000012
(0.9015, 0.7539)

0.0137

101

142

0.05320
(0.3906, 0.1319)

7.0097

0.00756
(0.7870, 0.2921)

0.9096

0.000013
(0.9014, 0.7532)

0.0130

134

188

0.05320
(0.3905, 0.1319)

7.0092

0.00755
(0.7870, 0.2919)

0.9099

0.000013
(0.9012, 0.7575)

0.0135

wp and xp stand for stream function and vorticity at the primary eddy center.
ws and xs stand for stream function and vorticity at the secondary eddy center.
c
wt and xt stand for stream function and vorticity at the tertiary eddy center.
b

Table 5
Extrema of horizontal and vertical velocities along the line joining centers of EG and FG for Re 1000.
Nx

Ny

umax

numax

58
81
101
134

82
114
142
188

0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000

(0.5000,
(0.5000,
(0.5000,
(0.5000,

1.0000)
1.0000)
1.0000)
1.0000)

umin

numin

v max

nv max

v min

nv min

0.0262
0.0266
0.0269
0.0268

0.7392
0.7400
0.7406
0.7405

0.0156
0.0159
0.0162
0.0162

0.6140
0.6136
0.6143
0.6149

0.0164
0.0167
0.0170
0.0170

0.8791
0.8786
0.8780
0.8780

Table 6
Extrema of horizontal and vertical velocities along line joining G to the center of EF for Re 1000.
Nx

Ny

umax

r umax

umin

r umin

v max

r v max

v min

r v min

58
81
101
134

82
114
142
188

0.1891
0.1889
0.1888
0.1888

0.9190
0.9192
0.9192
0.9192

1.0000
1.0000
1.0000
1.0000

1.1180
1.1180
1.1180
1.1180

0.2437
0.2434
0.2431
0.2433

0.9582
0.9584
0.9584
0.9584

0.0025
0.0026
0.0027
0.0027

0.4814
0.4825
0.4810
0.4808

(a)

(b)

(c)
Fig. 3. Streamline contours for ow in a right triangular driven cavity. (a) Re 100; (b) Re 500; and (c) Re 1000.

45

A. Jagannathan et al. / Computers & Fluids 95 (2014) 4048

Table 7
Flow quantities for different Reynolds numbers (N x 134; N y 188).
Re

wp np ; gp

xp

ws ns ; gs

100

0.06454

5.0289

0.000063

(0.5535, 0.1479)
500

0.06062

0.05320

wt nt ; gt

5.7536

0.00250

0.0412

3:73  10
(0.9680, 0.9025)

2:529  104

0.4802

1:50  106
(0.9285, 0.8291)

2:957  103

0.9099

1:48  105
(0.9012, 0.7575)

1:403  102

(0.7799, 0.4502)
7.0092

(0.3905, 0.1319)

0.00755

xt
8

(0.8737, 0.7017)

(0.4518, 0.1507)
1000

xs

(0.7870, 0.2919)

(a)

(b)

(c)
Fig. 4. Vorticity contours for ow in a right triangular driven cavity. (a) Re 100; (b) Re 500; and (c) Re 1000.

6. Pre-conditioning
As we have seen, the vorticitystream-function formulation requires the solution of the Poisson and Helmholtz equations for the
streamfunction and vorticity respectively at every time step. Both
of these are linear PDEs, and consequently the discretized 2-D
problem reduces to the solution of the matrix equations

^ x
^
Lw
^ g
Hx

6:1
6:2

where L and H respectively refer to the Laplacian and Helmholtz

operators with boundary conditions incorporated. The matrix L for
the triangular domain derived from Eq. (3.4) is ill-conditioned, having condition numbers of the order of 1018 for the nest grid
(N x 134; N y 188) utilized. This makes pre-conditioning necessary for its inversion. An attractive as well as natural choice for a
preconditioner as also considered by Heinrichs and Loch [10] is
the inverse of the corresponding nite difference operator, LFD 1 .
However, it turns out that the condition number of this operator
is of the same order as the corresponding spectral operator.

Table 8
Comparison of characteristics of the primary vortex (N x 134; N y 188) with results of [5,1].
Re

wp np ; gp

xp

Present

Ref. [1]

Ref. [5]

Present

Ref. [1]

Ref. [5]

100

0.06454
(0.5535, 0.1479)

0.06452
(0.5528, 0.1480)

0.06451
(0.5527, 0.1484)

5.02899

5.02972

5.01902

500

0.06062
(0.4518, 0.1507)

0.06072
(0.4514, 0.1518)

0.06065
(0.4531, 0.1504)

5.75363

5.75854

5.73737

1000

0.05320
(0.3905, 0.1319)

0.05325
(0.3919, 0.1322)

0.05306
(0.3906, 0.1309)

7.0092

6.99701

7.02235

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A. Jagannathan et al. / Computers & Fluids 95 (2014) 4048

0.08
0.06

(a)

(a)

Re=100
Re=500
Re=1000

0.04
0.02
0
0.02
0.04
0.5

0.03
0.02

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

(b)

(b)

0.01
0
0.01
Re=100
Re=500
Re=1000

0.02
0.03
0.5

1
0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

(c)
(c)

0
0.5
1
Re=100
Re=500
Re=1000

1.5
2
0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

Fig. 5. Velocity and vorticity along the line joining the centers of EG and FG
(N x 134; N y 188). (a) Horizontal velocity, u; (b) vertical velocity, v ; and (c)
vorticity, x.

Therefore, for its inversion, it is useful to use a row and column scaling procedure. To understand how this is done, we rewrite Eq. (6.1)
for the second order nite difference operator as follows:

^ Rx
^
RLFD CC 1 w

6:3

where R and C are the diagonal matrices containing, respectively

the row scale factors and column scale factors of LFD . The matrix
RLFD C is well conditioned, having a condition number of order
102 for the nest resolution. So the inverse of LFD is easily seen to be:

LFD 1 CRLFD C1 R

6:4
1

Equipped with the operator LFD , we can again rewrite Eq. (6.1) as

^ LFD 1 x
^
LFD 1 Lw

6:5

The same procedure is followed for inverting the Helmholtz

operator. In Table 1 the condition numbers for the original Laplacian and the preconditioned Laplacian operator are presented for

Fig. 6. Velocity and vorticity along the median from G to the center of EF
(N x 134; N y 188). (a) Horizontal velocity, u; (b) vertical velocity, v ; (c) vorticity,
x.

each of the four grids. Table 2 presents the same numbers for the
Helmholtz operator for Re 1000. We see that for both these operators we are able to bring down the condition numbers from
O1018 and O1014 to single digit values.
Finally, the inuence matrix, as described in the previous section is well conditioned. Its condition number can be further reduced by taking advantage of the rowcolumn scaling procedure
described above. The results of this are in Table 3. An already well
conditioned matrix with condition numbers of O101 is brought
down to O1.
Note that, for both the Helmholtz operator and the inuence
matrix, the condition number slightly decreases for the largest
grid. This seemingly unexpected behavior is due to the fact that
both these operators depend on Dt, which, for stability, is chosen

47

A. Jagannathan et al. / Computers & Fluids 95 (2014) 4048

to be 104 for the largest grid. This is signicantly smaller than the
value of 5  104 which was the size of the time step for
N x 101; N y 142. As the Laplacian operator is independent of
the time step, the trend in the condition numbers is along expected
lines.

7. Numerical solution and validation

The inuence matrix method discussed in Section 5 is used to
solve the transformed system of equations in the square domain.
Convergent solutions were obtained using the subtraction method
for Reynolds number up to 1000. The converged solution at lower
Re was used to initialize the solution at the subsequent Re which
resulted in faster convergence. Singularity subtraction beyond
Re 1000 proved to be unstable which suggests that the asymptotic expansion in terms of powers of Re may not be valid for large
Res. Matrix inversions for the Laplacian and Helmholtz operators
were performed using a combination of the second order nite difference preconditioning and the row and column scaling procedure
discussed in Section 6.
Four grids are used to study the grid independent convergence
of the solution, with the order of the interpolating polynomials
N x 58; 81; 101; 134 and N y 82; 114; 142; 188. Grid independent
convergence up to nearly 5, 4 and 3 decimal places respectively is
achieved for the streamfunction value at the eddy centres, their
locations and vorticity at these locations (Table 4). Excellent convergence is also achieved for the extrema of velocity along the
the two dividing centerlines (Tables 5 and 6).
The rationale for using different N x and N y is as follows. A sidepof

the square is mapped onto the hypotenuse whose length is 2

times that of the other two sides of the triangle. It is, however,
not immediately clear what ratio of N y : N x is optimum for the
study. Therefore, an empirical ratio of N y =N x  1:4 was chosen.
The grid convergence study in Table 4 is done keeping this ratio
xed. The nest grid is about three times denser than the coarsest
one.
The time step used for the solution of Re 1000 with the nest
grid resolution is Dt 104 and the convergence criterion is:
7
5
n
n
kwn1
and kxn1
. Under this crix;y  xx;y k1 6 10
x;y  wx;y k1 6 10
terion, the solution for Re 1000 reached convergence at
t 32:52. Moffatt [14] showed that for viscous ows near sharp
stagnant corners, there exists an innite sequence of eddies with
vortex intensities and distance from the stagnant corner following
a geometric sequence. In a numerical solution, it is of course
impossible to capture this innite sequence. Moreover, only the
rst few eddies are of practical interest, the others having very
low intensities.
We refer to the vortex closest to the driving wall as the primary
vortex, the one below it as the secondary vortex and the bottommost as the tertiary vortex. These are easily identied in Fig. 3
where we have plotted the streamline patterns for the ow at different Reynolds numbers. The center of the primary vortex is seen
to move away from the right angle for increasing Reynolds numbers. The secondary and tertiary eddies grow in size and strength
(Table 7) with Re. The vorticity contours are plotted in Fig. 4. The
effect of singularity subtraction is manifest from the smoothness
of these contours near the top corners. It must be mentioned that
even with the nest resolution employed, we were only able to
capture the rst three eddies of the ow and only one sufciently
close to the vertex G. We were thus unable to verify Moffatts [14]
analytical result, namely, that the intensity and distance of the innite sequence of eddies from the stagnant corner follow a geometric sequence.
The location of the vortex centers are found by identifying the
local maxima/minima of w. For this, we again take advantage of

Table 9
Vorticity along sliding wall EF (N x 134; N y 188).
n

Re 100

Re 500

Re 1000

0.9500
0.9000
0.8500
0.8000
0.7500
0.7000
0.6500
0.6000
0.5500
0.5000
0.4500
0.4000
0.3500
0.3000
0.2500
0.2000
0.1500
0.1000
0.0500

48.4712
26.5495
18.7961
14.7422
12.2142
10.6449
9.6403
9.1266
9.0569
9.3930
10.1156
11.2279
12.7773
14.9075
17.9556
22.6132
30.5460
46.6508
95.3758

65.7513
41.1100
32.2989
27.3605
23.8789
20.5015
17.2705
14.2217
11.8099
10.4740
10.3620
11.4010
13.4672
16.4169
20.2094
25.0998
32.0036
45.4791
89.5508

81.1425
52.1853
41.5317
35.9274
33.4479
31.8904
30.5471
27.2432
21.5422
15.4732
11.7655
11.4030
13.6169
17.2559
22.0892
28.5531
36.9266
50.2124
90.6664

the fact that we know not only the values at the grid points, but
rather the interpolating polynomials in each direction too. This enables us to obtain the locations of the extrema with spectral
accuracy.
It is seen in Table 4 that the value of the streamfunction at the
eddy centers has converged up to 5 decimal places and the location
of the eddy centers has converged to about 4 decimal places,
whereas the vorticity has converged to almost 3 decimal places.
Gupta and Manohar [9] state that for the square driven cavity ow,
the value of the streamfunction at the primary vortex center is a
reliable indicator of accuracy. The vorticity value is sensitive to
the boundary conditions, which in this case, we enforce in an indirect way using the inuence matrix method to nd the values of
vorticity that would ensure the no-slip condition to be satised
on the boundaries. Further, Botella and Peyret [2] too note in their
benchmark study that the vorticity is the most sensitive quantity
since it is obtained by differentiation of the primitive variables.
Thus it might be reasonable to expect a lower convergence rate
for this variable than for the streamfunction.
The velocities and vorticity along the line joining the midpoints
of the two sides of the triangle EG and FG and parallel to the n axis
are plotted for the three Res considered in Fig. 5. A reversal of
trends is clearly observed for all the variables in the case of
Re 500 and Re 1000. On the contrary, the velocity and streamfunction along the median joining G to the center of EF, plotted in
Fig. 6 as a function of distance from the corner G indicate a more
clear trend. The extreme value of the vertical velocity, v along this
line shows a denite increase with Reynolds number. Further, it is
seen that the locations of the extrema of both horizontal and

Table 10
Velocity and vorticity along line joining center of EG to center of FG for Re 1000
(N x 134; N y 188).
n

1.0000
0.9500
0.9000
0.8500
0.8000
0.7500
0.7000
0.6500
0.6000
0.5500
0.5000

0.0000
0.0031
0.0108
0.0190
0.0247
0.0268
0.0260
0.0233
0.0188
0.0117
0.0000

0.0000
0.0097
0.0162
0.0159
0.0093
0.0000
0.0089
0.0148
0.0159
0.0111
0.0000

0.1832
0.2115
0.1534
0.0509
0.0368
0.0735
0.0539
0.0249
0.1656
0.3572
0.5802

48

A. Jagannathan et al. / Computers & Fluids 95 (2014) 4048

Table 11
Velocity and vorticity along the line joining G to the center of EF for Re 1000
(N x 134 and N y 188).
r

1.1180
1.0062
0.8944
0.7826
0.6708
0.5590
0.4472
0.3354
0.2236
0.1118

1.000000
0.027353
0.172177
0.017579
0.025082
0.026788
0.010957
0.001436
0.000149
0.000004

0.000000
0.198062
0.164001
0.033678
0.014373
0.000005
0.002398
0.000529
0.000004
0.000001

15.473226
3.635667
2.202352
0.831338
0.337278
0.073492
0.056842
0.034892
0.003575
0.000819

method. Singularity subtraction is employed at the top corners,

wherein we subtract the rst two terms of the asymptotic expansion of the solution at these points to yield a more regularized problem which can then be handled efciently using the Chebyshev
collocation method. The results obtained are found to agree well
with those from published work which used different schemes.
Acknowledgment
Partial support by the Ofce of Naval Research (Grant
N000141010472,
Program
manager
Kelly
Cooper)
is
acknowledged.
References

vertical velocities move closer to the sliding wall with increasing

Re. Table 9 provides reference values for the vorticity along the
sliding wall at xed intervals along the wall. We also provide tabulated values of velocity and streamfunction along the horizontal
centerline and the median joining G to the center of EF in Tables
10 and 11.
Finally, the results of this study are compared with the published results of Erturk and Gokcol [5] and Ahmed and Kuhlmann
[1]. This can be found in Table 8. It is seen that the results are in
excellent agreement with both these studies. In particular, the value of the streamfunction at the primary eddy center for all the
Reynolds numbers studied, agrees to nearly 4 decimal places, the
locations, to nearly 2 or 3 places and the vorticity, to nearly 2
places.
A last point worth discussing is the effect of round-off errors.
This is likely exacerbated near the corner G due to the singularity
of the mapping. As a matter of fact, we noticed that very close to
G, random uctuations are present in the streamline contours for
values smaller than 109 . The nature of the ow near this stagnant
corner is such that both the velocity and vorticity magnitudes are
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^ and H1 g incur non-insignicant round-off
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reported results, it is clear that the effect of these round-off errors
is conned to a very small region close to G.
8. Conclusions
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method for ow in a lid driven right-triangular cavity for Reynolds
numbers 100, 500 and 1000. The singular mapping employed
makes the enforcement of accurate vorticity boundary conditions
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