An important property for finite difference schemes designed on curvilinear meshes is the exact preservation of free-stream solutions. This property is difficult to fulfill for high order conservative essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) finite difference schemes. In this paper we explore an alternative flux formulation for such finite difference schemes which can preserve free-stream solutions, based on the numerical technique for the metric terms, which can be applied to this alternative flux formulation but is difficult to be applied to the standard finite difference formulation. Free-stream and vortex preservation properties are investigated, and comparison with standard finite difference WENO schemes is made. Theoretical derivation and numerical results show that the finite difference WENO schemes based on the alternative flux formulation can preserve free-stream and vortex solutions on both stationary and dynamically generalized coordinate systems, hence giving much better performance than the standard finite difference WENO schemes for such problems.

We are interested in front propagation problems in the presence of obstacles. We extend a previous work (Bokanowski, Cheng and Shu 09}), to propose a simple and direct discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method adapted to such front propagation problems. We follow the formulation of Bokanowski et al. (Bokanowski_Forcadel_Zidani_2010), leading to a level set formulation driven by $\min(u_t + H(x,\nabla u), u-g(x))=0$, where $g(x)$ is an obstacle function. The DG scheme is motivated by the variational formulation when the Hamiltonian $H$ is a linear function of $\nabla u$, corresponding to linear convection problems in presence of obstacles. The scheme is then generalized to nonlinear equations, written in an explicit form. Stability analysis are performed for the linear case with Euler forward, a Heun scheme and a Runge-Kutta third order time discretization using the technique proposed in Zhang and Shu 2010. Several numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the robustness of the method. Finally, a narrow band approach is considered in order to reduce the computational cost.

In this paper we present an error estimate for the explicit Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method to solve a linear hyperbolic equation in one dimension with discontinuous but piecewise smooth initial data. The discontinuous finite element space is made up of piecewise polynomials of arbitrary degree $k\geq1$, and time is advanced by the third order explicit total variation diminishing Runge-Kutta method under the standard CFL temporal-spatial condition. The $L^2(\mathbb{R}\backslash\mathcal{R}_T)$-norm error at the final time $T$ is optimal in both space and time, where $\mathcal{R}_T$ is the pollution region due to the initial discontinuity with the width $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T\beta}h^{1/2}\log(1/h))$. Here $h$ is the maximum cell length and $\beta$ is the flowing speed. These results are independent of the time step and hold also for the semi-discrete discontinuous Galerkin method.

Gibbs phenomenon is the particular manner how a global spectral approximation of a piecewise analytic function behaves at the jump discontinuity. The truncated spectral series has large oscillations near the jump, and the overshoot does not decay as the number of terms in the truncated series increases. There is therefore no convergence in the maximum norm, and convergence in smooth regions away from the discontinuity is also slow. In earlier work, a methodology is proposed to completely overcome this difficulty in the context of spectral collocation methods, resulting in the recovery of exponential accuracy from collocation point values of a piecewise analytic function. In this paper, we extend this methodology to handle spectral collocation methods for functions which are analytic in the open interval but have singularities at end-points. With this extension, we are able to obtain exponential accuracy from collocation point values of such functions. Similar to earlier work, the proof is constructive and uses the Gegenbauer polynomials $C^\lambda_n(x)$. The result implies that the Gibbs phenomenon can be overcome for smooth functions with endpoint singularities.

Robustness of numerical methods has attracted an increasing interest in the community of computational fluid dynamics. One mathematical aspect of robustness for numerical methods is the positivity-preserving property. At high Mach numbers or for flows near vacuum, solving the conservative Euler equations may generate negative density or internal energy numerically, which may lead to nonlinear instability and crash of the code. This difficulty is particularly profound for high order methods, for multi-material flows and for problems with moving meshes, such as the Lagrangian methods. In this paper, we construct both first order and uniformly high order accurate conservative Lagrangian schemes which preserve positivity of physically positive variables such as density and internal energy in the simulation of compressible multi-material flows with general equations of state (EOS). We first develop a positivity-preserving approximate Riemann solver for the Lagrangian scheme solving compressible Euler equations with both ideal and non ideal EOS. Then we design a class of high order positivity-preserving and conservative Lagrangian schemes by using the essentially non-oscillatory (ENO) reconstruction, the strong stability preserving (SSP) high order time discretizations and the positivity-preserving scaling limiter which can be proven to maintain conservation and uniformly high order accuracy and is easy to implement. One-dimensional and two-dimensional numerical tests for the positivity-preserving Lagrangian schemes are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods.

In this paper, we propose a multi-scale discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for second-order elliptic problems with curvilinear unidirectional rough coefficients by choosing a special non-polynomial approximation space. The key ingredient of the method lies in the incorporation of the local oscillatory features of the differential operators into the approximation space so as to capture the multi-scale solutions without having to resolve the finest scales. The unidirectional feature of the rough coefficients allows us to construct the basis functions of the DG non-polynomial approximation space explicitly, thereby greatly increasing the algorithm efficiency. Detailed error estimates for two-dimensional second-order DG methods are derived, and a general guidance on how to construct such non-polynomial basis is discussed. Numerical examples are also presented to validate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.

In this work, we study the unsteady axisymmetric mixed convection boundary layer flow and heat transfer of non-Newtonian power law fluid over a cylinder. Different from most classical works, the temperature dependent variable fluid viscosity and thermal conductivity are taken into account in highly coupled velocity and temperature fields. The motion of the fluid can be modeled by a time-dependent nonlinear parabolic system in cylindrical coordinates, which is solved numerically by using Chebyshev spectral method along with the strong stability preserving (SSP) third order Runge-Kutta time discretization. We apply the numerical solver to problems with different power law indices, viscosity parameter, thermal conductivity parameter and Richardson numbers, and compute up to the steady state. The numerical solver is checked by testing the spectral convergence of the numerical approximation to a smooth exact solution of the PDEs with source terms. Moreover, the combined effects of pertinent physical parameters on the flow and heat transfer characteristics are analyzed in detail.

Solving wave propagation problems within heterogeneous media has been of great interest and has a wide range of applications in physics and engineering. The design of numerical methods for such general wave propagation problems is challenging because the energy conserving property has to be incorporated in the numerical algorithms in order to minimize the phase or shape errors after long time integration. In this paper, we focus on multi-dimensional wave problems and consider linear second-order wave equation in heterogeneous media. We develop and analyze an LDG method, in which numerical fluxes are carefully designed to maintain the energy preserving property and accuracy. Compatible high order energy conserving time integrators are also proposed. The optimal error estimates and the energy conserving property are proved for the semi-discrete methods. Our numerical experiments demonstrate optimal rates of convergence, and show that the errors of the numerical solutions do not grow significantly in time due to the energy conserving property.

In applications such as astrophysics and inertial confinement fusion, there are many three-dimensional cylindrical-symmetric multi-material problems which are usually simulated by Lagrangian schemes in the two-dimensional cylindrical coordinates. For this type of simulation, a critical issue for the schemes is to keep spherical symmetry in the cylindrical coordinate system if the original physical problem has this symmetry. In the past decades, several Lagrangian schemes with such symmetry property have been developed, but all of them are only first order accurate. In this paper, we develop a second order cell-centered Lagrangian scheme for solving compressible Euler equations in cylindrical coordinates, based on the control volume discretizations, which is designed to have uniformly second order accuracy and capability to preserve one-dimensional spherical symmetry in a two-dimensional cylindrical geometry when computed on an equal-angle-zoned initial grid. The scheme maintains several good properties such as conservation for mass, momentum and total energy, and the geometric conservation law. Several two-dimensional numerical examples in cylindrical coordinates are presented to demonstrate the good performance of the scheme in terms of accuracy, symmetry, non-oscillation and robustness. The advantage of higher order accuracy is demonstrated in these examples.

In this paper, we survey our recent work on designing high order positivity-preserving well-balanced finite difference and finite volume WENO (weighted essentially non-oscillatory) schemes, and discontinuous Galerkin finite element schemes for solving the shallow water equations with a non-flat bottom topography. These schemes are genuinely high order accurate in smooth regions for general solutions, are essentially non-oscillatory for general solutions with discontinuities, and at the same time they preserve exactly the water at rest or the more general moving water steady state solutions. A simple positivity-preserving limiter, valid under suitable CFL condition, has been introduced in one dimension and reformulated to two dimensions with triangular meshes, and we prove that the resulting schemes guarantee the positivity of the water depth.