A shock-stable modification of the HLLC Riemann solver with reduced numerical dissipation

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the application of high-order methods in combination with the popular HLLC Riemann solver demonstrates that the grid-aligned shock instability can strongly affect simulation results when the grid resolution is increased. Beyond the well-documented two-dimensional behavior, the problem is particularly troublesome with three-dimensional simulations. Hence, there is a need for shock-stable modifications of HLLC-type solvers for high-speed flow simulations.Second, the paper provides a stabilization of the popular HLLC flux based on a recently proposed mechanism for grid aligned-shock instabilities Fleischmann et al. (2020) [8]. The instability was found to be triggered by an inappropriate scaling of acoustic and advection dissipation for local low Mach numbers. These low Mach numbers occur during the calculation of fluxes in transverse direction of the shock propagation, where the local velocity component vanishes. A centralized formulation of the HLLC flux is provided for this purpose, which allows for a simple reduction of nonlinear signal speeds. In contrast to other shock-stable versions of the HLLC flux, the resulting HLLC-LM flux reduces the inherent numerical dissipation of the scheme.The robustness of the proposed scheme is tested for a comprehensive range of cases involving strong shock waves. Three-dimensional single- and multi-component simulations are performed with high-order methods to demonstrate that the HLLC-LM flux also copes with latest challenges of compressible high-speed computational fluid dynamics.