Second-Order Time-Accurate ALE Schemes for Flow Computations with Moving and Topologically Changing Grids

In computations of unsteady flow problems by the arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) method, the introduction of the grid velocity in the transport terms of the governing equations is not a sufficient condition for conservativeness if topology changes in the dynamic mesh are present and the number of mesh cells changes. We discuss an extension to second-order time differencing schemes (Implicit Euler and Crank–Nicolson) in the finite volume framework, to achieve second-order time-accuracy of the solution. Numerical experiments are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the presented method.