On high-order shock-fitting and front-tracking schemes for numerical simulation of shock–disturbance interactions

High-order methods that can resolve interactions of flow-disturbances with shock waves are critical for reliable numerical simulation of shock wave and turbulence interaction. Such problems are not well understood due to the limitations of numerical methods. Most of the popular shock-capturing methods are only first-order accurate at the shock and may incur spurious numerical oscillations near the shock. Shock-fitting algorithms have been proposed as an alternative which can achieve uniform high-order accuracy and can avoid possible spurious oscillations incurred in shock-capturing methods by treating shocks as sharp interfaces. We explore two ways for shock-fitting: conventional moving grid set-up and a new fixed grid set-up with front tracking. In the conventional shock-fitting method, a moving grid is fitted to the shock whereas in the newly developed fixed grid set-up the shock front is tracked using Lagrangian points and is free to move across the underlying fixed grid. Different implementations of shock-fitting methods have been published in the literature. However, uniform high-order accuracy of various shock-fitting methods has not been systematically established. In this paper, we carry out a rigorous grid-convergence analysis on different variations of shock-fitting methods with both moving and fixed grids. These shock-fitting methods consist of different combinations of numerical methods for computing flow away from the shock and those for computing the shock movement. Specifically, we consider fifth-order upwind finite-difference scheme and shock-capturing WENO schemes with conventional shock-fitting and show that a fifth-order convergence is indeed achieved for a canonical one-dimensional shock-entropy wave interaction problem. We also show that the method of finding shock velocity from one characteristic relation and Rankine–Hugoniot jump condition performs better than the other methods of computing shock velocities. A high-order front-tracking implementation of shock-fitting is also presented in this paper and nominal rate of convergence is shown. The front-tracking results are validated by comparing to results from the conventional shock-fitting method and a linear-interaction analysis for a two-dimensional shock disturbance interaction problem.