A fully conservative and shift-invariant formulation for Galerkin discretizations of incompressible variable density flow

Abstract: This paper introduces a formulation of the variable density incompressible Navier-Stokes equations by modifying the nonlinear terms in a consistent way. For Galerkin discretizations, the formulation leads to full discrete conservation of mass, squared density, momentum, angular momentum and kinetic energy without the divergence-free constraint being strongly enforced. In addition to favorable conservation properties, the formulation is shown to make the density field invariant to global shifts. The effect of viscous regularizations on conservation properties is also investigated. Numerical tests validate the theory developed in this work. The new formulation shows superior performance compared to other formulations from the literature, both in terms of accuracy for smooth problems and in terms of robustness.