Order of accuracy of QUICK and related convection-diffusion schemes (Q1909472)

This paper is a contribution made in order to attempt to clarify some of the misunderstandings that have arisen in the controversy concerning the formal accuracy of the QUICK scheme in computational fluid dynamics. For definiteness, the author considers the equation \[ {d\phi\over dx}= {1\over \text{Pe}} {d^2\phi\over dx^2}+ S(x), \] where \(\text{Pe}\) \((> 0)\) is the Péclet number. One particular deduction made is that the original QUICK scheme and the SPUDS scheme are both third order; however the QUICK finite volume convection operator is 33\% more accurate than the single point implementation of SPUDS. The analysis is supported by numerical studies and examples and an appendix is given in which the relationship between the truncation error and the discretization error is examined.