Implementation and Validation of Semi-Implicit WENO Schemes Using OpenFOAM®

In this article, the development of high-order semi-implicit interpolation schemes for convection terms on unstructured grids is presented. It is based on weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) reconstructions which can be applied to the evaluation of any field in finite volumes using its known cell-averaged values. Here, the algorithm handles convex cells in arbitrary three-dimensional meshes. The implementation is parallelized using the Message Passing Interface. All schemes are embedded in the code structure of OpenFOAM® resulting in the access to a huge open-source community and the applicability to high-level programming. Several verification cases and applications of the scalar advection equation and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations show the improved accuracy of the WENO approach due to a mapping of the stencil to a reference space without scaling effects. An efficiency analysis indicates an increased computational effort of high-order schemes in comparison to available high-resolution methods. However, the reconstruction time can be efficiently decreased when more processors are used.