Lagrangian fractional step method for the incompressible Navier--Stokes equations on a periodic domain

In the Lagrangian fractional step method introduced in this paper, the fluid velocity and pressure are defined on a collection of N fluid markers. At each time step, these markers are used to generate a Voronoi diagram, and this diagram is used to construct finite-difference operators corresponding to the divergence, gradient, and Laplacian. The splitting of the Navier--Stokes equations leads to discrete Helmholtz and Poisson problems, which we solve using a two-grid method. The nonlinear convection terms are modeled simply by the displacement of the fluid markers. We have implemented this method on a periodic domain in the plane. We describe an efficient algorithm for the numerical construction of periodic Voronoi diagrams, and we report on numerical results which indicate the the fractional step method is convergent of first order. The overall work per time step is proportional to N log N. copyright 1987 Academic Press, Inc