The piston effect in supercritical fluids investigated via a reversible–irreversible vector field splitting-based explicit time integration scheme

In the vicinity of the liquid–vapor critical point, supercritical fluids behave strongly compressible and, in parallel, thermophysical properties have strong state dependence. These lead to various peculiar phenomena, one of which is the piston effect where a sudden heating induces a mechanical pulse. The coupling between thermal and mechanical processes, in the linear approximation, yields a non-trivially rich thermoacoustics. The numerous applications of supercritical fluids raise the need for a reliable yet fast and efficient numerical solution for thermoacoustic time and space dependence in this sensitive domain. Here, we present a second-order accurate, fully explicit staggered space–time grid finite difference method for such coupled linear thermoacoustic problems. Time integration is based on the splitting of the state space vector field representing the interactions that affect the dynamics into reversible and irreversible parts, which splitting procedure leads to decoupled wave and heat equations. The former is a hyperbolic partial differential equation, while the latter is a parabolic one; therefore, different time integration algorithms must be amalgamated to obtain a reliable, dispersion error-free, and dissipation error-free numerical solution. Finally, the thermoacoustic approximation of the supercritical piston effect is investigated via the developed method.