A shock-stable numerical scheme accurate for contact discontinuities: Applications to 3D compressible flows

Abstract

The low-dissipation Roe scheme is a popular shock capturing scheme but the shock instability, such as the infamous carbuncle phenomenon, seriously affects its application in high Mach number flows. Although considerable research has been undertaken in two dimensions, mechanism analysis of the three-dimensional shock instability is relatively scarce. Numerical simulations of the Sedov blast wave indicate that the shock instability is more prominent in three dimensions, so it has theoretical and practical significance to analyze and heal the numerical instability. The mechanism for three-dimensional shock instability has been thoroughly studied by means of the linearized stability analysis and the dissipation-controlling approach which introduces the required transverse dissipation in the numerical shock layer and is adopted to enhance the Roe scheme’s shock stability. Furthermore, the unphysical expansion shock resulting from the violation of entropy condition is eliminated by a simple modification of numerical signal speed. For the improvement of the resolution for contact discontinuities and shear waves, an algebraic method which combines the THINC reconstruction scheme and the BVD algorithm is employed to minimize the density difference in the numerical diffusion term. A series of benchmark numerical experiments fully demonstrate that the proposed scheme is endowed with excellent robustness against the shock instability and high accuracy for contact discontinuities and shear waves.