Effects of Different Slope Limiters on Stratified Shear Flow Simulation in a Non-hydrostatic Model

Abstract

To simulate the dynamical structures of stratified shear flows, the high-resolution Total Variation Diminishing (TVD) method is necessary and widely-used due to its high-order spatial accuracy, oscillation control, and ability to capture the well-defined structures of vortices. Lack of understanding the TVD slope limiters usually results in inaccurate numerical simulation on stratified shear flows in terms of shear instability and spatiotemporal variations of mixing. In this study, the performances of four typical TVD slope limiters, namely the minmod, van Leer, Monotonized Central (MC), and superbee limiters, were investigated on modelling stratified shear flows based on the open-source non-hydrostatic model, NHWAVE. The four slope limiters are all commonly-used and have the typical numerical characteristics. All the limiters were respectively applied in two classical test cases, namely, shear instability and lock-exchange problem. The simulation results showed that the effects of slope limiters were correlated with their characteristics of numerical dissipation (or anti-dissipation), which can influence notably the model predictions of the generation of shear instability, the development of interfacial structures, and the mixing process. In the test cases, MC limiter’s performance was the best, because it could simulate the well-defined structures of instability while not introducing noticeable error. Minmod has an excessively large dissipation, which introduced noticeable numerical errors that can influence the model accuracy and can even suppress or omit the generation of interfacial vortices. Superbee limiter, the most anti-dissipative one, usually over-predicted the instability and mixing effects in time and space domain, and was likely to cause computational instability in some cases. The performances of van Leer and MC were similar, but their predictions of the evolutions of interfacial structures and mixing could be significantly different. Besides, the co-effects of grid resolution and slope limiters were also investigated; it was found that the refinement of grids may not help to reproduce a higher-quality result with a specific slope limiter.