Improved shock-capturing methods for multicomponent and reacting flows (Q1815917)

For chemically reacting flow simulations, existing splitting methods often generate nonphysical waves at stiff reaction fronts. We show that this numerical phenomenon is due to the mixture model that overestimates the reaction temperature. This is avoided by introducing an enforcement on the reaction temperature that depends on the temperatures of each species. We demonstrate that the method computes detonation waves with time steps and grid sizes much larger than would be allowed to resolve reaction zones.