Characteristic Flux-Difference Improvement for Inviscid and Viscous Hypersonic Blunt Body Flows

The Characteristic Flux Difference Splitting (CFDS) scheme designed to adapt the characteristic boundary conditions at the wall and inflow/outflow boundary planes satisfies Roe's property U, although the CFDS Jacobian matrix is decomposed by a product of elaborate transformation matrices and explicit eigenvalue matrix. When the CFDS algorithm, thus a variant of Roe's scheme, is applied straightforwardly to hypersonic flows over a blunt body, the strong bow shock gradually breaks down near the stagnation point. This numerical instability is widely observed by many researchers employing flux-difference method, known in the literature as the carbuncle phenomenon. Many remedies have been proposed and resulted in partial cures. When the idea of Sanders et al. which identifies the minimum eigenvalues near the discontinuity present is applied to CFDS method, it is shown that the instability problem can be controlled successfully. A few flux splitting methods have also been tested and results are compared against the Nakamori's Mach 8 blunt body flow.