A team of researchers has developed a novel hybrid scheme that combines the strengths of the MUSCL finite volume method and the THINC discontinuity sharpening technique, providing a more precise and high-resolution alternative for compressible flow computations. This innovative approach has the potential to significantly improve the accuracy and robustness of numerical simulations in various industries, such as aerospace and mechanical engineering.
Compressible Flow Simulations are also Gap!
The sheer complexity of compressible flows and various phenomena (for instance, shock waves and discontinuities) has been making it difficult for scientists and engineers to properly simulate these systems since the inception of modern CFD.
The MUSCL finite volume method has been used widely in aerospace engineering, due to its computationally beneficial mathematical simplicity and well-known ability to accurately treat fundamental flows with shock waves; however for more complex flows MUSCL frequently dissipates the solution, leading to a decrease of overall simulation accuracy.
To solve this problem, the research team proposed a new hybrid regime, T-MUSCL that fuses MUSCL scheme with THINC discontinuity enhancing procedure. The hybrid method is developed to supply an acceptable compromise between the physics of the nonlinearity and a reconstruction process, such that it captures weak as well as strong shockwaves accurately.
Accuracy and Stability of the T-MUSCL Hybrid Scheme
The innovation in the T-MUSCL approach is that the process of reconstruction, driven by the local nonlinearity and discontinuity at target cell, has been optimized. The research team have developed a hybrid scheme that takes into account the characteristics of the flow field by adding two main parameters i.e., a nonlinearity-weighted parameter and a slope-ratio weighted parameter.
This adaptive treatment enables the T-MUSCL scheme to deliver higher accuracy for continuous flow simulations with lower errors than the standard MUSCL method. Importantly, it shows that carefully constructed weak moving and stationary shock waves can be captured very accurately without numerical dissipation well beyond the capability of MUSCL in the conventional sense.
Moreover, the two-dimensional steady blunt body and strong shock wave problems have demonstrated that T-MUSCL is able to obtain a faster convergence rate than MUSCL and alleviate unstable computational behaviors. Thus, the hybrid scheme is a more practical one suitable for a wide range of applications.
Conclusion
This work is a fundamental progress in compressible flow simulations due to the novel integration of our T-MUSCL hybrid scheme. Combining the best features of both the MUSCL finite volume method and THINC discontinuity sharpening approach, this methodology provides improved accuracy, robustness and clear capturing capability for weak and strong shockwaves.
This innovation is enabled to extended the insights of compressible flow and shock wave phenomena, thus, contributing for the future possibility in aerospace or mechanical engineering applicative breakthrough. Next, the research team is preparing to use the T-MUSCL scheme in practical engineering problems as a new tool for many fluid dynamics researchers and practitioners.
