Improving stability of stabilized and multiscale formulations in flow simulations at small time steps

The objective of this paper is to show that use of the element-vector-based definition of stabilization parameters, introduced in [T.E. Tezduyar, Computation of moving boundaries and interfaces and stabilization parameters, Int. J. Numer. Methods Fluids 43 (2003) 555–575; T.E. Tezduyar, Y. Osawa, Finite element stabilization parameters computed from element matrices and vectors, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 190 (2000) 411–430], circumvents the well-known instability associated with conventional stabilized formulations at small time steps. We describe formulations for linear advection–diffusion and incompressible Navier–Stokes equations and test them on three benchmark problems: advection of an L-shaped discontinuity, laminar flow in a square domain at low Reynolds number, and turbulent channel flow at friction-velocity Reynolds number of 395.