Poloidal-toroidal decomposition in a finite cylinder

• Authors: Piotr Boronski;Laurette S. Tuckerman
• Venue: Journal of Computational Physics
• Year: 2007

The Navier-Stokes equations in a finite cylinder are written in terms of poloidal and toroidal potentials in order to impose incompressibility. Regularity of the solutions is ensured in several ways: First, the potentials are represented using a spectral basis which is analytic at the cylindrical axis. Second, the non-physical discontinuous boundary conditions at the cylindrical corners are smoothed using a polynomial approximation to a steep exponential profile. Third, the nonlinear term is evaluated in such a way as to eliminate singularities. The resulting pseudo-spectral code is tested using exact polynomial solutions and the spectral convergence of the coefficients is demonstrated. Our solutions are shown to agree with exact polynomial solutions and with previous calculations of axisymmetric vortex breakdown and of onset of non-axisymmetric helical spirals. Parallelization by azimuthal wavenumber is shown to be highly effective.