Non-homogeneous anisotropic bulk viscosity for acoustic wave attenuation in weakly compressible methods

A major limitation of the weakly compressible approaches to simulate incompressible flows is the appearance of artificial acoustic waves that introduce mass conservation errors and lead to spurious oscillations in the force coefficients. In this work, we propose a non-homogeneous anisotropic bulk viscosity term to effectively damp the acoustic waves. By implementing this term in a computational framework based on the recently proposed general pressure equation, we demonstrate that the non-homogeneous and anisotropic nature of the term makes it significantly more effective than the isotropic homogeneous version widely used in the literature. Moreover, it is computationally more efficient than the pressure (or mass) diffusion term, which is an alternative mechanism used to suppress acoustic waves. We simulate a range of benchmark problems to comprehensively investigate the performance of the bulk viscosity on the effective suppression of acoustic waves, mass conservation error, order of convergence of the solver, and computational efficiency. The proposed form of the bulk viscosity enables fairly accurate modelling of the initial transients of unsteady simulations, which is highly challenging for weakly compressible approaches, and to the best of our knowledge, existing approaches can't provide an accurate prediction of such transients. •Inclusion of non-homogeneous anisotropic bulk viscosity to suppress acoustic waves.•Accurate prediction of initial transients in a truly unsteady challenging test case.•Effectiveness of bulk viscosity over pressure diffusion to deal with acoustic waves.