A strictly conservative Cartesian cut-cell method for compressible viscous flows on adaptive grids

A Cartesian cut-cell method which allows the solution of two- and three-dimensional viscous, compressible flow problems on arbitrarily refined graded meshes is presented. The finite-volume method uses cut cells at the boundaries rendering the method strictly conservative in terms of mass, momentum, and energy. For three-dimensional compressible flows, such a method has not been presented in the literature, yet. Since ghost cells can be arbitrarily positioned in space the proposed method is flexible in terms of shape and size of embedded boundaries. A key issue for Cartesian grid methods is the discretization at mesh interfaces and boundaries and the specification of boundary conditions. A linear least-squares method is used to reconstruct the cell center gradients in irregular regions of the mesh, which are used to formulate the surface flux. Expressions to impose boundary conditions and to compute the viscous terms on the boundary are derived. The overall discretization is shown to be second-order accurate in L-1. The accuracy of the method and the quality of the solutions are demonstrated in several two- and three-dimensional test cases of steady and unsteady flows. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.