The Characteristics-Based Matching (CBM) Method for Compressible Flow With Moving Boundaries and Interfaces

Recently, Eulerian methods for capturing interfaces in multi-fluid problems become increasingly popular. While these methods can effectively handle significant deformations of interface, the treatment of the boundary conditions in certain classes of compressible flows are known to produce nonphysical oscillations due to the radical change in equation of state across the material interface. One promising recent development to overcome these problems is the Ghost Fluid Method (GFM). The present study initiates a new methodology for boundary condition capturing in multifluid compressible flows. The method, named Characteristics-Based Matching (CBM), capitalizes on recent developments of the level set method and related techniques, i.e., PDE-based re-initialization and extrapolation, and the Ghost Fluid Method (GFM). Specifically, the CBM utilizes the level set function to capture interface position and a GFM-like strategy to tag computational nodes. In difference to the GFM method, which employs a boundary condition capturing in primitive variables, the CBM method implements boundary conditions based on a characteristic decomposition in the direction normal to the boundary. In this way overspecification of boundary conditions is avoided and we believe so will be spurious oscillations. In this paper, we treat (moving or stationary) fluid-solid interfaces and present numerical results for a select set of test cases. Extension to fluid-fluid interfaces will be presented in a subsequent paper.