A Conservative Discontinuous Galerkin Discretization for the Chemically Reacting Navier-Stokes Equations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-order discontinuous Galerkin method for simulating chemically reacting compressible flows, ensuring conservation, accuracy, and stability without unphysical oscillations, validated on complex flow problems.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel DG discretization that preserves pressure equilibrium and conservation in reactive flows, along with an hp-adaptive ODE solver for stiff chemical kinetics.

Findings

No unphysical pressure oscillations in test cases

Accurate high-order temperature and species profiles

Successful simulation of complex reactive flow phenomena

Abstract

We present a detailed description and verification of a discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (DG) for the multi-component chemically reacting compressible Navier-Stokes equations that retains the desirable properties of DG, namely discrete conservation and high-order accuracy in smooth regions of the flow. Pressure equilibrium between adjacent elements is maintained through the consistent evaluation of the thermodynamics model and the resulting weak form, as well as the proper choice of nodal basis. As such, the discretization does not generate unphysical pressure oscillations in smooth regions of the flow or at material interfaces where the temperature is continuous. Additionally, we present an hp-adaptive DG method for solving systems of ordinary differential equations, DGODE, which is used to resolve the temporal evolution of the species concentrations due to stiff chemical reactions. The coupled solver is applied to several challenging test problems including multi-component shocked flows as well as chemically reacting detonations, deflagrations, and shear flows with detailed kinetics. We demonstrate that the discretization does not produce unphysical pressure oscillations and, when applicable, we verify that it maintains discrete conservation. The solver is also shown to reproduce the expected temperature and species profiles throughout a detonation as well as the expected two-dimensional cellular detonation structure. We also demonstrate that the solver can produce accurate, high-order, approximations of temperature and species profiles without artificial stabilization for the case of a one-dimensional pre-mixed flame. Finally, high-order solutions of two- and three-dimensional multi-component chemically reacting shear flows, computed without any additional stabilization, are presented.