Assessment of a high-order shock-capturing central-difference scheme for hypersonic turbulent flow simulations

High-speed turbulent flows are encountered in most space-related applications (including exploration, tourism and defense fields) and represent a subject of growing interest in the last decades. A major challenge in performing high-fidelity simulations of such flows resides in the stringent requirements for the numerical schemes to be used. These must be robust enough to handle strong, unsteady discontinuities, while ensuring low amounts of intrinsic dissipation in smooth flow regions. Furthermore, the wide range of temporal and spatial active scales leads to concurrent needs for numerical stabilization and accurate representation of the smallest resolved flow scales in cases of under-resolved configurations. In this paper, we present a finite-difference high-order shock-capturing technique based on Jameson's artificial diffusivity methodology. The resulting scheme is ninth-order-accurate far from discontinuities and relies on the addition of artificial dissipation close to large gradient flow regions. The shock detector is slightly revised to enhance its selectivity and avoid spurious activations of the shock-capturing term. A suite of test cases ranging from 1D to 3D configurations (namely, perfect-gas and chemically reacting shock tubes, Shu–Osher problem, isentropic vortex advection, under-expanded jet, compressible Taylor–Green Vortex, supersonic and hypersonic turbulent boundary layers) is analyzed in order to test the capability of the proposed numerical strategy to handle a large variety of problems, ranging from calorically-perfect air to multi-species reactive flows. Results obtained on under-resolved grids are also considered to test the applicability of the proposed strategy in the context of implicit Large-Eddy Simulations.