A kinetic energy--and entropy-preserving scheme for compressible two-phase flows

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel numerical scheme for compressible two-phase flows that preserves kinetic energy and entropy discretely, ensuring stability and accuracy in turbulent regimes, with broad applicability to single-phase flows.

Contribution

The paper develops a new set of numerical fluxes satisfying consistency conditions that exactly conserve kinetic energy and approximately conserve entropy, enhancing stability in compressible flow simulations.

Findings

The scheme is stable for high Reynolds number turbulence simulations.

It accurately conserves kinetic energy and entropy in test cases.

The method effectively simulates droplet-laden compressible turbulence.

Abstract

Accurate numerical modeling of compressible flows, particularly in the turbulent regime, requires a method that is non-dissipative and stable at high Reynolds ($Re$) numbers. For a compressible flow, it is known that discrete conservation of kinetic energy is not a sufficient condition for numerical stability, unlike in incompressible flows. In this study, we adopt the recently developed conservative diffuse-interface method (Jain, Mani $\&$ Moin, $\textit{J. Comput. Phys.}$, 2020) along with the five-equation model for the simulation of compressible two-phase flows. This method discretely conserves the mass of each phase, momentum, and total energy of the system. We here propose discrete consistency conditions between the numerical fluxes, such that any set of numerical fluxes that satisfy these conditions would not spuriously contribute to the kinetic energy and entropy of the system. We also present a set of numerical fluxes\textemdash which satisfies these consistency conditions\textemdash that results in an exact conservation of kinetic energy and approximate conservation of entropy in the absence of pressure work, viscosity, thermal diffusion effects, and time-discretization errors. Since the model consistently reduces to the single-phase Navier-Stokes system when the properties of the two phases are identical, the proposed consistency conditions and numerical fluxes are also applicable for a broader class of single-phase flows. To this end, we present coarse-grid numerical simulations of compressible single-phase and two-phase turbulent flows at infinite $Re$, to illustrate the stability of the proposed method in canonical test cases, such as an isotropic turbulence and Taylor-Green vortex flows. A higher-resolution simulation of a droplet-laden compressible decaying isotropic turbulence is also presented, and the effect of the presence of droplets on the flow is analyzed.