Simulation of Multispecies Gas Flows using the Discontinuous Galerkin Method

Truncation errors and computational cost are obstacles that still hinder large-scale applications of the Computational Fluid Dynamics method. The discontinuous Galerkin method is one of the high-order schemes utilized extensively in recent years, which is locally conservative, stable, and high-order accurate. Besides that, it can handle complex geometries and irregular meshes with hanging nodes. In this document, the nondimensional compressible Euler equations and Reynolds- Averaged Navier-Stokes equations are discretized by discontinuous Galerkin methods with a two-equations turbulence model on both structured and unstructured meshes. The traditional equation of state for an ideal gas model is substituted by a multispecies thermodynamics model in order to complete the governing equations. An approximate Riemann solver is used for computing the convective flux, and the diffusive flux is approximated with some internal penalty based schemes. The temporal discretization of the partial differential equations is either performed explicitly with the aid of Rung-Kutta methods or with semi-implicit methods. Inspired by the artificial viscosity diffusion based limiter for shock-capturing method, which has been extensively studied, a novel and robust technique based on the introduction of mass diffusion to the species governing equations to guarantee that the species mass fractions remain positive has been thoroughly investigated. This contact-surface-capturing method is conservative and a high order of accuracy can be maintained for the discontinuous Galerkin method. For each time step of the algorithm, any trouble cell is first caught by the contact-surface discontinuity detector. Then some amount of mass diffusions are added to the governing equations to change the gas mixtures and arrive at an equilibrium point satisfying some conditions. The species properties are reasonable without any oscillations. Computations are performed for many steady and unsteady flow problems. For general non-mixing fluid flows, the classical air-helium shock bubble interaction problem is the central test case for the high-order discontinuous Galerkin method with a mass diffusion based limiter chosen. The computed results are compared with experimental, exact, and empirical data to validate the fluid dynamic solver