An unstructured shock-fitting technique for three-dimensional flows with shock interactions

The numerical simulation of hypersonic flows past blunt bodies by means of shockcapturing (S-C) solvers is characterized by some critical challenges, including: stagnation point anomalies, spurious numerical oscillations, the carbuncle phenomenon and the reduction of the order of accuracy of the solution in the entire region downstream of a captured shock worsen the solution quality. This paper describes an updated version of the unstructured shock-fitting (S-F) algorithm for three-dimensional flows. In particular, we present a comparison between the results obtained computing hypersonic flows on blunt bodies using both the S-C and S-F techniques on nearly identical tetrahedral meshes, with a special interest on the grid-convergence properties of the two different shock-modeling options.