A Stokes-consistent backflow stabilization for physiological flows

Abstract

In computational fluid dynamics incoming flow at open boundaries, or emphbackflow, often yields to unphysical instabilities for high Reynolds numbers. It is widely accepted that this is due to the incoming energy arising from the convection term, which cannot be empha priori controlled when the velocity field is unknown at the boundary. In order to improve the robustness of the numerical simulations, we propose a stabilized formulation based on a penalization of the residual of a weak Stokes problem on the open boundary, whose viscous part controls the incoming convective energy, while the inertial term contributes to the kinetic energy. We also present different strategies for the approximation of the boundary pressure gradient, which is needed for defining the stabilization term. The method has the advantage that it does not require neither artificial modifications or extensions of the computational domain. Moreover, it is consistent with the Womersley solution. We illustrate our approach on numerical examples