Consistent Internal Energy Based Schemes for the Compressible Euler Equations

Abstract

Numerical schemes for the solution of the Euler equations have recently been developed, which involve the discretisation of the internal energy equation, with corrective terms to ensure the correct capture of shocks, and, more generally, the consistency in the Lax-Wendroff sense. These schemes may be staggered or colocated, using either structured meshes or general simplicial or tetrahedral/hexahedral meshes. The time discretization is performed by fractional-step algorithms; these may be either based on semi-implicit pressure correction techniques or segregated in such a way that only explicit steps are involved (referred to hereafter as “explicit” variants). In order to ensure the positivity of the density, the internal energy and the pressure, the discrete convection operators for the mass and internal energy balance equations are carefully designed; they use an upwind technique with respect to the material velocity only. The construction of the fluxes thus does not need any Riemann or approximate Riemann solver, and yields easily implementable algorithms. The stability is obtained without restriction on the time step for the pressure correction scheme and under a CFL-like condition for explicit variants: preservation of the integral of the total energy over the computational domain, and positivity of the density and the internal energy. The semi-implicit first-order upwind scheme satisfies a local discrete entropy inequality. If a MUSCL-like scheme is used in order to limit the scheme diffusion, then a weaker property holds: the entropy inequality is satisfied up to a remainder term which is shown to tend to zero with the space and time steps, if the discrete solution is controlled in L^∞ and BV norms. The explicit upwind variant also satisfies such a weaker property, at the price of an estimate for the velocity which could be derived from the introduction of a new stabilization term in the momentum balance. Still for the explicit scheme, with the above-mentioned MUSCL-like scheme, the same result only holds if the ratio of the time to the space step tends to zero.