Engineering Commons^™

Why You Should Not Use 'Hybrid', 'Power-Law' Or Related Exponential Schemes For Convective Modelling—There Are Much Better Alternatives, Brian Leonard, Jerry Drummond

Dr. Jerry E. Drummond

In many areas of computational fluid dynamics, especially numerical convective heat and mass transfer, the ‘Hybrid’ and ‘Power-Law’ schemes have been widely used for many years. The popularity of these methods for steady-state computations is based on a combination of algorithmic simplicity, fast convergence, and plausible looking results. By contrast, classical (second-order central) methods often involve convergence problems and may lead to obviously unphysical solutions exhibiting spurious numerical oscillations. Hybrid, Power-Law, and the exponential-difference scheme on which they are based give reasonably accurate solutions for steady, quasi-one-dimensional flow (when the grid is aligned with the main flow direction). However, they …