The incompressible Navier-Stokes (INS) equations upon discretization on fixed meshes become a system of differential algebraic equations (DAE) of index 2. It is proved in this paper that for the general explicit and implicit Runge-Kutta (RK)methods, the time accuracy of velocity is the same as that for the ordinary differential equations, by taking into consideration of the special form of the resulting DAE; (the time accuracy of pressure can be lower). For the three-stage secondorder explicit RK method, algorithms with less (than three) Poisson solutions of pressure are proposed and verified by numerical experiments. However, in practical computation of complex flows it is found that the method must satisfy the so-called consistency condition for the components of the solution (here the velocity and the pressure) of the DAE for the method to be robust.
