Energy-stable auxiliary variable viscosity splitting (AVVS) method for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations and turbidity current system

In this work, we develop a novel energy-stable linear approach, which we name as auxiliary variable viscosity splitting (AVVS) method, to efficiently solve the incompressible fluid flows. Different from the projection-type methods with pressure correction, the AVVS method adopts the viscosity splitting strategy to split the original momentum equation into an intermediate momentum equation without divergence-free constraint and an advection-free momentum equation. A time-dependent auxiliary variable which has exact value 1 is introduced to construct a supplementary equation. The new model not only inherits the same dynamics of original incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, but also facilitates us to design linearly decoupled and energy-stable time-marching scheme. Comparing with the conventional projection-type schemes, the present method leads to an energy dissipation law with respect to kinetic energy instead of a modified energy including velocity and pressure gradient. In each time step, only two parabolic equations with constant coefficients and one Poisson equation need to be solved. Therefore, the numerical implementation is highly efficient. Moreover, the proposed AVVS method can be directly extended to construct linear, decoupled, and energy-stable scheme for the turbidity current system with slight modifications on the right-hand side of supplementary equation. Extensive numerical experiments are implemented to validate the accuracy, energy stability, and capability in complex fluid simulations.