Influence of TVD Limiters on Wave Structure Produced by an Instantaneous Release of Energy Using OpenFOAM

The paper studies the influence of the Minmod, van Leer and van Albada flux limiters to numerically simulate the formation of a blast wave following an instantaneous energy release. Mesh and CFL sensitivity analyses are carried out using the upwind reconstruction and the Minmod limiter. Important differences are found in the time step sensitivity analysis between the upwind scheme and when a limiter is implemented, where a lower CFL is necessary to properly describe the flow field. Different comparisons of pressure, velocity, temperature and density profiles between the upwind reconstruction and the Minmod, van Leer and van Albada limiters are studied for different times after energy release. It was found that the upwind scheme is highly diffusive due to the nature of the scheme itself and cannot correctly capture some discontinuities. The simulations are carried out using the Kurganov, Noelle and Petrova (KNP) scheme in the rhoCentralFoam solver implemented in the OpenFOAM software.