Development of a Shock-Stable and Contact-Preserving Scheme for Multidimensional Euler Equations

The shock instability, notably the disastrous carbuncle phenomenon, has plagued many low-dissipation Godunov-type numerical schemes in calculations of high Mach flows. In the current work, two popular stability analysis tools and corresponding numerical experiments are used to investigate the root cause of shock instability of the low-dissipation Harten, Lax, and van Leer with contact (HLLC) scheme. The local linear stability analysis reveals that the HLLC flux could attenuate all perturbations in the streamwise direction but not perturbations of density and shear velocity in the transverse direction. Numerical results also indicate that the shock instability of the HLLC scheme is only related to the transverse flux. The viscosity terms of entropy wave and shear wave are introduced into the transverse flux, and the stability analysis shows that with the help of additional viscosities the shock instability of the HLLC scheme is cured. To preserve the capability of resolving contact discontinuities and shear waves, a pressure-based switching function is incorporated into the expressions of viscosity terms so that the additional viscosities are activated only when calculating the transverse flux in the shock layer. A series of numerical experiments give evidence of the robustness and accuracy of the proposed scheme, and the strategy adopted here can be easily applied to cure shock instabilities of other low-dissipation numerical schemes, e.g., the Roe scheme and the AUSM+ scheme.