Shock-Fitting Versus Shock-Capturing Modeling of Strong Shocks in Nonequilibrium Plasmas

In this paper, a supersonic flow of an argon plasma around a cylinder has been investigated comparing shock fitting and shock capturing techniques. Shock-capturing codes are algorithmically simple, but are plagued by a number of numerical troubles, particularly evident when the shocks are strong and the grids unstructured. On the other hand, shock-fitting algorithms allow to accurately compute solutions on coarse meshes, but tend to be algorithmically complex. The kinetic scheme adopted includes the argon metastable state as an independent species and takes into account for electron-atom and atom-atom processes. Electron density distributions have been reported.