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.

In this paper, we adapt a simple weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) limiter, originally designed for discontinuous Galerkin (DG) schemes, to the correction procedure via reconstruction (CPR) framework for solving conservation laws. The objective of this simple WENO limiter is to simultaneously maintain uniform high order accuracy of the CPR framework in smooth regions and control spurious numerical oscillations near discontinuities. The WENO limiter we adopt in this paper is particularly simple to implement and will not harm the conservativeness of the CPR framework. Also, it uses information only from the target cell and its immediate neighbors, thus can maintain the compactness of the CPR framework. Since the CPR framework with the WENO limiter does not in general preserve positivity of the solution, we also extend the positivity preserving limiters to the CPR framework. Numerical results in one and two dimensions are provided to illustrate the good behavior of this procedure.