A Roe-type scheme with low Mach number preconditioning for a two-phase compressible flow model with pressure relaxation

We describe two-phase compressible flows by a hyperbolic six-equation single-velocity two-phase flow model with stiff mechanical relaxation. In particular, we are interested in the simulation of liquid-gas mixtures such as cavitating flows. The model equations are numerically approximated via a fractional step algorithm, which alternates between the solution of the homogeneous hyperbolic portion of the system through Godunov-type finite volume schemes, and the solution of a system of ordinary differential equations that takes into account the pressure relaxation terms. When used in this algorithm, classical schemes such as Roe's or HLLC prove to be very efficient to simulate the dynamics of transonic and supersonic flows. Unfortunately, these methods suffer from the well known difficulties of loss of accuracy and efficiency for low Mach number regimes encountered by upwind finite volume discretizations. This issue is particularly critical for liquid-gasmixtures due to the large and rapid variation in the flow of the acoustic impedance. To cure the problem of loss of accuracy at low Mach number, in this work we apply to our original Roe-type scheme for the two-phase flow model the Turkel's preconditioning technique studied by Guillard-Viozat [Computers & Fluids, 28, 1999] for the Roe's scheme for the classical Euler equations.We present numerical results for a two-dimensional liquid-gas channel flow test that show the effectiveness of the resulting Roe-Turkel method for the two-phase system.