Exact Pressure Evolution Equation for Incompressible Fluids

An important aspect of computational fluid dynamics is related to the determination of the fluid pressure in isothermal incompressible fluids. In particular this concerns the construction of an exact evolution equation for the fluid pressure which replaces the Poisson equation and yields an algorithm which is a Poisson solver, i.e., it permits to time-advance exactly the same fluid pressure without solving the Poisson equation. In fact, the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations represent a mixture of hyperbolic and elliptic pde's, which are extremely hard to study both analytically and numerically. This amounts to transform an elliptic type fluid equation into a suitable hyperbolic equation, a result which usually is reached only by means of an asymptotic formulation. Besides being a still unsolved mathematical problem, the issue is relevant for at least two reasons: a) the proliferation of numerical algorithms in computational fluid dynamics which reproduce the behavior of incompressible fluids only in an asymptotic sense (see below); b) the possible verification of conjectures involving the validity of appropriate equations of state for the fluid pressure. Another possible motivation is, of course, the ongoing quest for efficient numerical solution methods to be applied for the construction of the fluid fields {,V,p}, solutions of the initial and boundary-value problem associated to the incompressible N-S equations (INSE). In this paper we intend to show that an exact solution to this problem can be achieved adopting the approach based on inverse kinetic theory (IKT) recently developed for incompressible fluids by Tessarotto et al. <cite>Ellero2005,Ellero2004,Ellero2005,Tessarotto2006,Tessarotto2006b</cite>. In particular we intend to prove that the evolution of the fluid fields can be achieved by means of a suitable dynamical system, to be identified with the so-called Navier-Stokes (N-S) dynamical system. As a consequence it is found that the fluid pressure obeys a well-defined evolution equation. The result appears relevant for the construction of Lagrangian approaches to fluid dynamics.