  The Artificial Compressibility Method (ACM) for the incompressible
Navier-Stokes equations is (link-wise) reformulated (referred to as LW-ACM) by
a finite set of discrete directions (links) on a regular Cartesian mesh, in
analogy with the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM). The main advantage is the
possibility of exploiting well established technologies originally developed
for LBM and classical computational fluid dynamics, with special emphasis on
finite differences (at least in the present paper), at the cost of minor
changes. For instance, wall boundaries not aligned with the background
Cartesian mesh can be taken into account by tracing the intersections of each
link with the wall (analogously to LBM technology). LW-ACM requires no
high-order moments beyond hydrodynamics (often referred to as ghost moments)
and no kinetic expansion. Like finite difference schemes, only standard Taylor
expansion is needed for analyzing consistency. Preliminary efforts towards
optimal implementations have shown that LW-ACM is capable of similar
computational speed as optimized (BGK-) LBM. In addition, the memory demand is
significantly smaller than (BGK-) LBM. Importantly, with an efficient
implementation, this algorithm may be one of the few which is compute-bound and
not memory-bound. Two- and three-dimensional benchmarks are investigated, and
an extensive comparative study between the present approach and state of the
art methods from the literature is carried out. Numerical evidences suggest
that LW-ACM represents an excellent alternative in terms of simplicity,
stability and accuracy.
