Wall-driven incompressible viscous flow in a two-dimensional semi-circular cavity

The main goal of this article is to investigate the capability of an operator-splitting/finite elements based methodology at handling accurately incompressible viscous flow at large Reynolds number (Re) in regions with corners and curved boundaries. To achieve this goal the authors have selected a wall-driven flow in a semi-circular cavity. On the basis of the numerical experiments reported in this article it seems that the method under investigation has no difficulty at capturing the formation of primary, secondary and tertiary vortices as Re increases; it has also the capability of identifying a Hopf bifurcation phenomenon taking place around Re = 6600.