Analysis of the numerical dissipation rate of different Runge–Kutta and velocity interpolation methods in an unstructured collocated finite volume method in OpenFOAM®

The approach used for computation of the convecting face fluxes and the cell face velocities results in different underlying numerical algorithms in finite volume collocated grid solvers for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. In this study, the effect of the following five numerical algorithms on the numerical dissipation rate and on the temporal consistency of a selection of Runge–Kutta schemes is analysed: (1) the original algorithm of Rhie and Chow (1983), (2) the standard OpenFOAM method, (3) the algorithm used by Vuorinen et al. (2014), (4) the Kazemi-Kamyab et al. (2015) method, and (5) the D'Alessandro et al. (2018) approach. The last three algorithms refer to recent implementations of low dissipative numerical methods in OpenFOAM®. No new computational methods are presented in this paper. Instead, the main scientific contributions of this paper are: (1) the systematic assessment of the effect of the considered five numerical approaches on the numerical dissipation rate and on the temporal consistency of the selected Runge–Kutta schemes within one unified framework which we have implemented in OpenFOAM, and (2) the application of the method of Komen et al. (2017) in order to quantify the numerical dissipation rate introduced by three of the five numerical methods in quasi-DNS and under-resolved DNS of fully-developed turbulent channel flow. In addition, we explain the effects of the introduced numerical dissipation on the observed trends in the corresponding numerical results. As one of the major conclusions, we found that the pressure error, which is introduced due to the application of a compact stencil in the pressure Poisson equation, causes a reduction of the order of accuracy of the temporal schemes for the test cases in this study. Consequently, application of higher order temporal schemes is not useful from an accuracy point of view, and the application of a second order temporal scheme appears to be sufficient.