Practical evaluation of three finite difference schemes for the computation of steady-state recirculating flows

Three discretization schemes for the computation of recirculating flows in approximating the convective terms are compared, namely: (1) the hybrid central/upwind differencing scheme, (2) the hybrid central/skew-upwind differencing scheme and (3) the quadratic, upstream-weighted differencing scheme. It is shown that the upwind formulation (1) may lead to severe solution errors due to artifical diffusion while the alternative formulations (2) and (3) are found to yield significantly better solution accuracy in a number of test cases, although they involve to a limited extent boundedness problems. The schemes are applied to two confined, laminar, recirculating flows, and it is found that in these cases artificial diffusion resulting from skewness is insignificant, but for turbulent flow cases the application of schemes (2) and (3) present definite advantages.