On the Accuracy of Upwind and Symmetric TVD Schemes in Simulating Low Mach Number Flow

The accuracy of MUSCL upwind and Yee-Roe-Davis symmetric TVD schemes for simulating low Mach number flow is studied through a numerical experiment of the 2-D lid driven cavity problem. The steady slate solution is reached by using a marching approach based on the pseudocompressibilty method in conjunction with implicit approximate factorization. A finite volume discretization of the conservation equations is used with a four level multigrid method to accelerate the convergence. The tests performed which were in the range of 100 ≤ Re ≤ 5000, show that the Yee-Roe-Davis symmetric scheme generates results in very good agreement with the benchmark results over this range of Re. The MUSCL upwind scheme accuracy deteriorates with the increasing Re.