An accurate moving boundary formulation in cut-cell methods

Abstract

A cut-cell method for Cartesian meshes to simulate viscous compressible flows with moving boundaries is presented. We focus on eliminating unphysical oscillations occurring in Cartesian grid methods extended to moving-boundary problems. In these methods, cells either lie completely in the fluid or solid region or are intersected by the boundary. For the latter cells, the time dependent volume fraction lying in the fluid region can be so small that explicit time-integration schemes become unstable and a special treatment of these cells is necessary. When the boundary moves, a fluid cell may become a cut cell or a solid cell may become a small cell at the next time level. This causes an abrupt change in the discretization operator and a suddenly modified truncation error of the numerical scheme. This temporally discontinuous alteration is shown to act like an unphysical source term, which deteriorates the numerical solution, i.e., it generates unphysical oscillations in the hydrodynamic forces exerted on the moving boundary. We develop an accurate moving boundary formulation based on the varying discretization operators yielding a cut-cell method which avoids these discontinuities. Results for canonical two- and three-dimensional test cases evidence the accuracy and robustness of the newly developed scheme.