Numerical dissipation of flux splitting schemes for contact discontinuities

Abstract

The contact discontinuity is simulated by three kinds of flux splitting schemes to evaluate and analyse the influence of numerical dissipation in this paper. The numerical results of one-dimensional contact discontinuity problem show that if the flow velocity on both sides of the contact discontinuity is not simultaneously supersonic, the non-physical pressure and velocity waves may occur when the initial theoretically contact discontinuity is smeared into a transition zone spanning several grid-cells caused by numerical dissipations. Since these non-physical waves have no effect on the corresponding density dissipation, this paper considers these fluctuations as only numerical errors and are not part of the numerical dissipation. In addition, for two-dimensional flow field, the characteristics of high-order accuracy difference schemes, i.e. low dissipation and high resolution, may induce the multi-dimensional non-physical waves that interfere with each other to produce more complex non-physical flow structures, so the fluctuations in the calculated results should be treated with caution.