A high-order adaptive Cartesian cut-cell method for simulation of compressible viscous flow over immersed bodies

A new adaptive finite volume conservative cut-cell method that is third-order accurate for simulation of compressible viscous flows is presented. A high-order reconstruction approach using cell centered piecewise polynomial approximation of flow quantities, developed in the past for body-fitted grids, is now extended to the Cartesian based cut-cell method. It is shown that the presence of cut-cells of very low volume results in numerical oscillations in the flow solution near the embedded boundaries when standard small cell treatment techniques are employed. A novel cell clustering approach for polynomial reconstruction in the vicinity of the small cells is proposed and is shown to achieve smooth representation of flow field quantities and their derivatives on immersed interfaces. It is further shown through numerical examples that the proposed clustering method achieves the design order of accuracy and is fairly insensitive to the cluster size. Results are presented for canonical flow past a single cylinder and a sphere at different flow Reynolds numbers to verify the accuracy of the scheme. Investigations are then performed for flow over two staggered cylinders and the results are compared with prior data for the same configuration. All the simulations are carried out with both quadratic and cubic reconstruction, and the results indicate a clear improvement with the cubic reconstruction. The new cut-cell approach with cell clustering is able to predict accurate results even at relatively low resolutions. The ability of the high-order cut-cell method in handling sharp geometrical corners and narrow gaps is also demonstrated using various examples. Finally, three-dimensional flow interactions between a pair of spheres in cross flow is investigated using the proposed cut-cell scheme. The results are shown to be in excellent agreement with past studies, which employed body-fitted grids for studying this complex case.