A new shock-capturing scheme for stiff detonation waves problems

Abstract: A new approach to prevent spurious behavior caused by conventional shock-capturing schemes when solving stiff detonation waves problems is introduced in the present work. Due to smearing of discontinuous solution by the excessive numerical dissipation, conventional shock-capturing schemes have difficulties to obtain the correct location of detonation front without enough grids resolution. To overcome the excessive numerical errors around discontinuities by traditional discretized schemes used in non-reacting high speed compressible flow, we introduce a new shock-capturing scheme in which besides linear function constructed by MUSCL (Monotone Upstream-centered Schemes for Conservation Law) scheme, a step like THINC (Tangent of Hyperbola for INterface Capturing) function is also employed as another candidate in the reconstruction process. The final reconstruction function is determined by boundary variation diminishing (BVD) algorithm by which numerical dissipation around discontinuities can be reduced significantly. The new resulted shock-capturing scheme is named MUSCL-THINC-BVD. One- and two-dimensional comparative numerical tests about stiff detonation waves problems are conducted with the 5th order WENO (Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory) and MUSCL-THINC-BVD scheme respectively, which show MUSCL-THINC-BVD scheme can capture the correct position of detonation waves with improved resolution while WENO scheme, in spite of higher order, produces spurious waves. Compared with other existing methods which involves extra treatments by accepting the smeared out discontinuities profiles, the current method obtain the correct but also sharp detonation front by fundamentally reducing numerical dissipation errors from shock-capturing schemes. Thus the proposed approach is an effective but simple method to solve stiff detonation problems.