A conservative approximation to compressible two-phase flow models in the stiff mechanical relaxation limit (Q950371)

Compressible two-phase flows are quite difficult to study due to the presence of complex physical processes (chemical reactions and/or phase transitions, momentum and energy exchange between the phases, etc.), and due to a large number of spatial and temporal scales associated with those processes. In this article the authors propose a conservative approximation to models for compressible two-phase flows in the limit of stiff mechanical relaxation. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 the authors present a one-pressure one-velocity model and derive a conservative approximation to it. Although this two-phase model can be applied to various compressible flows, the authors focus on the study of detonations in gases carrying solid particles. Hence, they augment the system of conservation equations by conservation laws for particle number density and gaseous reactant mass fraction. The entire system can be cast in a divergence (conservative) form. In Section 3 the characteristic analysis of the reduced conservative model is performed, and the Riemann invariants and Rankine-Hugoniot shock relations are derived. Section 4 presents a steady wave analysis for the governing equations. The structure of these waves is compared with the one of the corresponding gaseous detonations (ZND waves). Finally, in Section 5 the authors consider the transmission of a gaseous detonation to a heterogeneous mixture, containing reacting or inert solid particles, and discuss the results obtained by one-dimensional numerical simulations. They also provide the results of preliminary two-dimensional simulations.