A Critical Investigation of High-Order Flux Limiters In Multiphase Flow Problems

In recent years finite volume computations of two-fluid hydrodynamic models have been used in a number of numerical investigations of gas-solids fluidized bed and circulating fluidized bed processes. To avoid numerical diffusion from dominating simulation results, proper discretization of convective terms is critical i e higher-order methods should be used in the computation of convective terms at cell faces. It is well known that higher-order methods may give rise to nonphysical spatial oscillations. This problem is routinely addressed in single-phase theory by using flux limiters that satisfy certain constraints in order to obtain total variation diminishing schemes. However, applying these methods to multiphase flow problems is not straightforward and a critical look at these methods in a multiphase context is needed.