A Semi-Lagrangian Godunov-Type Method without Numerical Viscosity for Shocks

One of the most important and complex effects in compressible fluid flow simulation is a shock-capturing mechanism. Numerous high-resolution Euler-type methods have been proposed to resolve smooth flow scales accurately and to capture the discontinuities simultaneously. One of the disadvantages of these methods is a numerical viscosity for shocks. In the shock, the flow parameters change abruptly at a distance equal to the mean free path of a gas molecule, which is much smaller than the cell size of the computational grid. Due to the numerical viscosity, the aforementioned Euler-type methods stretch the parameter change in the shock over few grid cells. We introduce a semi-Lagrangian Godunov-type method without numerical viscosity for shocks. Another well-known approach is a method of characteristics that has no numerical viscosity and uses the Riemann invariants or solvers for water hammer phenomenon modeling, but in its formulation the convective terms are typically neglected. We use a similar approach to solve the one-dimensional adiabatic gas dynamics equations, but we split the equations into parts describing convection and acoustic processes separately, with corresponding different time steps. When we are looking for the solution to the one-dimensional problem of the scalar hyperbolic conservation law by the proposed method, we additionally use the iterative Godunov exact solver, because the Riemann invariants are non-conserved for moderate and strong shocks in an ideal gas. The proposed method belongs to a group of particle-in-cell (PIC) methods; to the best of the author’s knowledge, there are no similar PIC numerical schemes using the Riemann invariants or the iterative Godunov exact solver. This article describes the application of the aforementioned method for the inviscid Burgers’ equation, adiabatic gas dynamics equations, and the one-dimensional scalar hyperbolic conservation law. The numerical analysis results for several test cases (e.g., the standard shock-tube problem of Sod, the Riemann problem of Lax, the double expansion wave problem, the Shu–Osher shock-tube problem) are compared with the exact solution and Harten’s data. In the shock for the proposed method, the flow properties change instantaneously (with an accuracy dependent on the grid cell size). The iterative Godunov exact solver determines the accuracy of the proposed method for flow discontinuities. In calculations, we use the iteration termination condition less than 10−5 to find the pressure difference between the current and previous iterations.