Consistency and Convergence of a High Order Accurate Meshless Method for Solution of Incompressible Fluid Flows

Computations of incompressible flows with velocity boundary conditions require solution of a Poisson equation for pressure with all Neumann boundary conditions. Discretization of such a Poisson equation results in a rank-deficient matrix of coefficients. When a non-conservative discretization method such as finite difference, finite element, or spectral scheme is used, such a matrix also generates an inconsistency which makes the residuals in the iterative solution to saturate at a threshold level that depends on the spatial resolution and order of the discretization scheme. In this paper, we examine inconsistency for a high-order meshless discretization scheme suitable for solving the equations on a complex domain. The high order meshless method uses polyharmonic spline radial basis functions (PHS-RBF) with appended polynomials to interpolate scattered data and constructs the discrete equations by collocation. The PHS-RBF provides the flexibility to vary the order of discretization by increasing the degree of the appended polynomial. In this study, we examine the convergence of the inconsistency for different spatial resolutions and for different degrees of the appended polynomials by solving the Poisson equation for a manufactured solution as well as the Navier-Stokes equations for several fluid flows. We observe that the inconsistency decreases faster than the error in the final solution, and eventually becomes vanishing small at sufficient spatial resolution. The rate of convergence of the inconsistency is observed to be similar or better than the rate of convergence of the discretization errors. This beneficial observation makes it unnecessary to regularize the Poisson equation by fixing either the mean pressure or pressure at an arbitrary point. A simple point solver such as the SOR is seen to be well-convergent, although it can be further accelerated using multilevel methods.