A staggered scheme for the compressible Euler equations on general 3D meshes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a stable, staggered finite volume discretization scheme for the compressible Euler equations on general 3D polyhedral meshes, ensuring consistency and applicability to both incompressible and compressible flows.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel staggered discretization approach for the Euler equations on complex 3D meshes, avoiding problematic dual mesh interpolations and ensuring convergence.

Findings

Stable discretization on various mesh types

Consistent convection operator in the Lax-Wendroff sense

Effective for both constant and variable density flows

Abstract

We address here the discretization of the momentum convection operator for fluid flow simulations on 2D triangular and quadrangular meshes and 3D polyhedral meshes containing hexahedra, tetrahedra, prisms and pyramids. The finite volume scheme that we use for the full Euler equations is based on a staggered discretization: the density unknowns are associated with a primal mesh, whereas the velocity unknowns are associated with a "fictive" dual mesh. Accordingly, the convection operator of the mass balance equation is derived on the primal mesh, while the the convection operator of the momentum balance equation is discretized on the dual mesh. To avoid any hazardous interpolation of the unknowns on a possibly ill-defined dual mesh, the mass fluxes of the momentum convection operator are computed from the mass fluxes of the mass balance equation, so as to ensure the stability of the resulting operator. A coherent reconstruction of these dual fluxes is possible, based only on the kind of considered polygonal or polyhedral cell, and not on each cell itself. Moreover, we show that this process still yields a consistent convection operator in the Lax-Wendroff sense, that is, if a sequence of piecewise constant functions is supposed to converge to a a given limit, then the weak form of the corresponding discrete convection operator converges to the weak form of the continuous operator applied to this limit. The derived discrete convection operator applies to both constant and variable density flows and may thus be implemented in a scheme for incompressible or compressible flows. Numerical tests are performed for the Euler equations on several types of mesh, including hybrid meshes, and show the excellent performance of the method.