Cures for the shock instability: Development of a shock-stable Roe scheme

Abstract

This paper deals with the development of an improved Roe scheme that is free from the shock instability and still preserves the accuracy and efficiency of the original Roe’s Flux Difference Splitting (FDS). Roe’s FDS is known to possess good accuracy but to suffer from the shock instability, such as the carbuncle phenomenon. As the first step towards a shock-stable scheme, Roe’s FDS is compared with the HLLE scheme to identify the source of the shock instability. Through a linear perturbation analysis on the odd–even decoupling problem, damping characteristic is examined and Mach number-based functions f and g are introduced to balance damping and feeding rates, which leads to a shock-stable Roe scheme. In order to satisfy the conservation of total enthalpy, which is crucial in predicting surface heat transfer rate in high-speed steady flows, an analysis of dissipation mechanism in the energy equation is carried out to find out the error source and to make the proposed scheme preserve total enthalpy. By modifying the maximum-minimum wave speed, the problem of expansion shock and numerical instability in the expansion region is also remedied without sacrificing the exact capturing of contact discontinuity. Various numerical tests concerned with the shock instability are performed to validate the robustness of the proposed scheme. Then, viscous flow test cases ranging from transonic to hypersonic regime are calculated to demonstrate the accuracy, robustness, and other essential features of the proposed scheme.