Compact high order finite volume method on unstructured grids III: Variational reconstruction

This paper presents a variational reconstruction for the high order finite volume method in solving the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations on arbitrary unstructured grids. In the variational reconstruction, an interfacial jump integration is defined to measure the jumps of the reconstruction polynomial and its spatial derivatives on each cell interface. The system of linear equations to determine the reconstruction polynomials is derived by minimizing the total interfacial jump integration in the computational domain using the variational method. On each control volume, the derived equations are implicit relations between the coefficients of the reconstruction polynomials defined on a compact stencil involving only the current cell and its direct face-neighbors. The reconstruction and time integration coupled iteration method proposed in our previous paper is used to achieve high computational efficiency. A problem-independent shock detector and the WBAP limiter are used to suppress non-physical oscillations in the simulation of flow with discontinuities. The advantages of the finite volume method using the variational reconstruction over the compact least-squares finite volume method proposed in our previous papers are higher accuracy, higher computational efficiency, more flexible boundary treatment and non-singularity of the reconstruction matrix. A number of numerical test cases are solved to verify the accuracy, efficiency and shock-capturing capability of the finite volume method using the variational reconstruction.