Flows in which the primary features of interest do not rely on high-frequency
acoustic effects, but in which long-wavelength acoustics play a nontrivial
role, present a computational challenge. Integrating the entire domain with
low-Mach-number methods would remove all acoustic wave propagation, while
integrating the entire domain with the fully compressible equations can in some
cases be prohibitively expensive due to the CFL time step constraint. For
example, simulation of thermoacoustic instabilities might require fine
resolution of the fluid/chemistry interaction but not require fine resolution
of acoustic effects, yet one does not want to neglect the long-wavelength wave
propagation and its interaction with the larger domain. The present paper
introduces a new multi-level hybrid algorithm to address these types of
phenomena. In this new approach, the fully compressible Euler equations are
solved on the entire domain, potentially with local refinement, while their
low-Mach-number counterparts are solved on subregions of the domain with higher
spatial resolution. The finest of the compressible levels communicates
inhomogeneous divergence constraints to the coarsest of the low-Mach-number
levels, allowing the low-Mach-number levels to retain the long-wavelength
acoustics. The performance of the hybrid method is shown for a series of test
cases, including results from a simulation of the aeroacoustic propagation
generated from a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in low-Mach-number mixing layers.
It is demonstrated that compared to a purely compressible approach, the hybrid
method allows time-steps two orders of magnitude larger at the finest level,
leading to an overall reduction of the computational time by a factor of 8
