[matthewshorter]

Hello,
I am trying to simulate an axisymmetric shock tube with a 150:1 pressure ratio across the driver and driven regions. Currently, I can run the simulation with a lower 15:1 pressure ratio and get the expected results for that case but I run into floating point errors almost immediately under the actual conditions (after <1e-6 seconds). The simulation uses room temperature helium with a driven section initial pressure of 0.1atm. The driver and driven sections are of unequal radii, with the driver being about twice the diameter of the driven section. All parameters are using the physical dimensions in the relevant SI base units except for the inviscid assumption. For BCs, I am using a fixedValue noslip condition for the wall velocity (slip was tried but with no effect), zeroGradient for wall pressure, and wedge for the front and back faces. What type of approach should I take to resolving this issue? I have rhoCentralFoam set up with the same solver configuration as the shockTube tutorial.

[matthewshorter]

Update: using blockMesh instead of GMSH (hex instead of tets) seems to help. I think the infinitesimally thin shock wave is messed up when the nodes are all jumbled with a tet mess, introducing errors that eventually blow up the solver. Hex mesh looks much, much better.