A method for reduction of numerical diffusion in the donor cell treatment of convection (Q1072879)

This article is concerned with the donor cell treatment of convection in numerical simulations of convective-diffusive flow. The two sources of numerical diffusion in this treatment, truncation error and crossflow diffusion, are explained and quantified. Truncation error occurs due to the use of approximate profile assumptions while crossflow diffusion arises due to cell-wise homogenization of the convected quantity in multidimensional problems. Crossflow diffusion is the dominant source of error in many cases. A corrective scheme is introduced in this article which compensates for the effect of crossflow diffusion by reducing the effective anisotropic diffusion coefficient used in the diffusion portion of the simulation. Relationships are developed quantifying the crossflow diffusional error and requirements for explicit numerical stability when the error correction technique is employed. The magnitudes of the diffusional error and the improvements realized using the corrective scheme are demonstrated through computational examples.