Advection Vs Convergence
 

My simulation runs fine with a high resolution (or) a upwind advection scheme but the run crashes when I use a second order (Blend = 1) and also when I use a specified blend factor = 0.5

What does this indicate ?

This behaviour might indicate a poor mesh quality or a "difficult" setup in general.
An Upwind advection scheme acts as a damping function to the numerical solution and thus supresses instabilities of the solver at the cost of lower accuracy.

Try achieving a converged flow field with the first order upwind scheme first.
Then use this flow field as the initial condition for the next run where you use a higher order scheme.

try to plot the contours of blending factor to see where you get the problems and what is the min value of it.