Preventing numerical errors generated by interface-capturing schemes in compressible multi-material flows

In the present work, errors generated in computations of compressible multi-material flows using shock-capturing schemes are examined, specifically pressure oscillations (when the specific heats ratio is variable), but also temperature spikes and species conservation errors. These numerical errors are generated at material discontinuities due to an inconsistent treatment of the convective terms. Though temperature errors are irrelevant to solutions to the Euler equations, it is shown that they have the potential to lead to problems when physical diffusion is included, i.e., for the Navier-Stokes equations. These errors are studied analytically and numerically by considering the one-dimensional advection of isolated material discontinuities. A methodology preventing such errors for weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes is presented, in which modified WENO weights are used to solve the transport equation for mass fraction in conservative form to prevent temperature and species conservation errors. Pressure errors are prevented by solving an additional transport equation for a given function of the ratio of specific heats. Several multi-dimensional problems with various discontinuities (shocks, material interfaces and contact discontinuities), including the single-mode Richtmyer-Meshkov instability, and turbulence are considered to test the method. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.