This paper describes a damped artificial compressibility method for accelerating steady-state fluid dynamics calculations at low Mach number (Ma). The acceleration is achieved by reducing the effective sound speed by a factor comparable to Ma, and by introducing an acoustic damping mechanism to remove transient sound waves more rapidly. The sound speed is reduced by allowing the pressure to artificially deviate from the state equation during the transient. This deviation is determined by a simple time evolution equation which replaces the state equation and reduces to it in steady-state. Since the method involves no modifications to the conservation equations, it is easily incorporated as an option in existing time-marching computer codes for compressible flow. As an illustrative example, the method is used to accelerate an explicit calculation of a steady inviscid internal flow field at Ma = 0.01

At the time of writing, John Ramshaw was affiliated with Idaho National Engineering Laboratory.