Chorin's approaches revisited: Vortex Particle Method vs Finite Volume Method

In the present paper, a Vortex Particle Method is combined with a Boundary Element Method for the study of viscous incompressible planar flow around solid bodies. The method is based on Chorins operator splitting approach for the Navier-Stokes equations written in vorticity-velocity formulation, and consists of an advection step followed by a diffusion step. The evaluation of the advection velocity exploits the Helmholtz-Hodge Decomposition, while the no-slip condition is enforced by an indirect boundary integral equation. The above decomposition and splitting are discussed in comparison to the analogous decomposition for the pressure-velocity formulation of the governing equations. The Vortex Particle Method is implemented with a completely meshless algorithm, as neither advection nor diffusion requires topological connection of the point lattice. The results of the meshless approach are compared with those obtained by a mesh-based Finite Volume Method, where the pseudo-compressible iteration is exploited to enforce the solenoidal constraint on the velocity field. Several benchmark tests were performed for verification and validation purposes. In particular, we analyzed the two-dimensional flow past a circle, past an ellipse with incidence and past a triangle for different Reynolds numbers.