A comparison of hyperbolic solvers for ideal and real gas flows

Classical and recent numerical schemes for solving hyperbolic conservation laws were analyzed for computational efficiency and application to nonideal gas flows. The Roe-Pike approximate Riemann solver with entropy correction, the Harten second-order scheme and the extension of the Roe-Pike method to second-order by the MUSCL strategy were compared for one-dimensional flows of an ideal gas. These methods require the so-called Roe's average state, which is frequently difficult and sometimes impossible to obtain. Other methods that do not require the average state are best suited for complex equations of state. Of these, the VFRoe, AUSM+ and Hybrid Lax-Friedrich-Lax-Wendroff methods were compared for one-dimensional compressible flows of a Van der Waals gas. All methods were evaluated regarding their accuracy for given mesh sizes and their computational cost for a given solution accuracy. It was shown that, even though they require more floating points and indirect addressing operations per time step, for a given time interval for integration the second-order methods are less-time consuming than the first-order methods for a required accuracy. It was also shown that AUSM+ and VFRoe are the most accurate methods and that AUSM+ is much faster than the others, and is thus recommended for nonideal one-phase gas flows.