Upwind discretization of the steady Navier–Stokes equations

Abstract A discretization method is presented for the full, steady, compressible Navier–Stokes equations. The method makes use of quadrilateral finite volumes and consists of an upwind discretization of the convective part and a central discretization of the diffusive part. In the present paper the emphasis lies on the discretization of the convective part. The solution method applied solves the steady equations directly by means of a non‐linear relaxation method accelerated by multigrid. The solution method requires the discretization to be continuously differentiable. For two upwind schemes which satisfy this requirement (Osher's and van Leer's scheme), results of a quantitative error analysis are presented. Osher's scheme appears to be increasingly more accurate than van Leer's scheme with increasing Reynolds number. A suitable higher‐order accurate discretization of the convection terms is derived. On the basis of this higher‐order scheme, to preserve monotonicity, a new limiter is constructed. Numerical results are presented for a subsonic flat plate flow and a supersonic flat plate flow with oblique shock wave–boundary layer interaction. The results obtained agree with the predictions made. Useful properties of the discretization method are that it allows an easy check of false diffusion and that it needs no tuning of parameters.