On a new defect of shock-capturing methods

This paper proposes an explanation and a cure (or avoidance) to the new defect found of Eulerian shock-capturing methods in “A note on the conservative schemes for the Euler equations” by Tang and Liu [H. Tang, Tiegang Liu, A note on the conservative schemes for the Euler equations, J. Comput. Phys. 218 (2006) 451–459]. The latter gives a numerical investigation using several popular high resolution conservative schemes applied to Riemann problems of inviscid, compressible, perfect gas flows in Eulerian and Lagrangian coordinates with an initial high density ratio as well as a high pressure ratio. The results show that these methods work very inefficiently when applied to such problems and may give inaccurate numerical results, especially in shock location (or speed), even with a very fine grid.We have found that in problems of this type a strong rarefaction wave (SRW) is present adjacent to a contact line. Godunov averaging over the wave then produces large errors which, when the wave is strong, also persist for a long time. The cumulative error is thus very large which violates the strength of the contact line adjacent to it which, in turn, affects the speed and hence the location of the shock on the other side of the contact. We confirm this numerically using a method based on the unified coordinates with the shock-adaptive Godunov scheme plus contact strength preserving. The method, when applied to the Examples 2.1 and 2.2 of Tang and Liu [H. Tang, Tiegang Liu, A note on the conservative schemes for the Euler equations, J. Comput. Phys. 218 (2006) 451–459], produces high quality results even for comparatively coarse grids.