compressibleInterFoam: unphysical oscillations in transonic flows

Closed Issue created 4 years ago

Summary

compressibleInterFoam produces unrealistic oscillations for transonic flow simulations. This can be demonstrated using a simple shockTube tutorial case. Interestingly, this problem was not present prior to OpenFOAM 5.0.

Steps to reproduce

Use the shockTube tutorial case of rhoCentralFoam and solve it with compressibleInterFoam with OpenFOAM v2006

Example case

I have attached the shockTube tutorial case set up for compressibleInterFoam and for comparison also the case for rhoPimpleFoam with OpenFOAM v2006 summary.zip. The solution for rhoPimpleFoam matches quite well with rhoCentralFoam. However, compressibleInterFoam is quite far off and oscillates strongly between x = 2 and x = 4. This happens for all OpenFOAM versions starting with 5.0, including the latest v2006. However, it does not happen in OpenFOAM 4.x and earlier.

Environment information

OpenFOAM version : v2006
Operating system : Debian 10
Hardware info :
Compiler : gcc 9.1

Possible fixes

This problem started somewhere around commit e8daaa5c767ac9731fb7ec3259043a4aae5ae972 in OpenFOAM 5.x. Prior to that (for example OpenFOAM 4.x), the results agree quite well with rhoCentralFoam and rhoPimpleFoam.