A FV-TD electromagnetic solver using adaptive Cartesian grids

A second-order finite-volume (FV) method has been developed to solve the time-domain (TD) Maxwell equations, which govern the dynamics of electromagnetic waves. The computational electromagnetic (CEM) solver is capable of handling arbitrary grids, including structured, unstructured, and adaptive Cartesian grids, which are topologically arbitrary. It is argued in this paper that the adaptive Cartesian grid is better than a tetrahedral grid for complex geometries considering both efficiency and accuracy. A cell-wise linear reconstruction scheme is employed to achieve second-order spatial accuracy. Second-order time accuracy is obtained through a two-step Runge-Kutta scheme. Issues on automatic adaptive Cartesian grid generation such as cell-cutting and cell-merging are discussed. A multi-dimensional characteristic absorbing boundary condition (MDC-ABC) is developed at the truncated far-field boundary to reduce reflected waves from this artificial boundary. The CEM solver is demonstrated with several test cases with analytical solutions.     

Toward a higher order unsteady finite volume solver based on reproducing kernel methods

During the last decades, research efforts are headed to develop high order methods on CFD and CAA to reach most industrial applications (complex geometries) which need, in most cases, unstructured grids. Today, higher-order methods dealing with unstructured grids remain in infancy state and they are still far from the maturity of structured grids-based methods when solving unsteady cases. From this point of view, the development of higher order methods for unstructured grids become indispensable. The finite volume method seems to be a good candidate, but unfortunately it is difficult to achieve space flux derivation schemes with very high order of accuracy for unsteady cases. In this paper we propose, a high order finite volume method based on Moving Least Squares approximations for unstructured grids that is able to reach an arbitrary order of accuracy on unsteady cases. In order to ensure high orders of accuracy, two strategies were explored independently: (1) a zero-mean variables reconstruction to enforce the mean order at the time derivative and (2) a pseudo mass matrix formulation to preserve the residuals order.     

High Order Finite Difference and Finite Volume Methods for Advection on the Sphere

Numerical schemes used for computational climate modeling and weather prediction are often of second order accuracy. It is well-known that methods of formal order higher than two offer a significant potential gain in computational efficiency. We here present two classes of high order methods for discretization on the surface of a sphere, first finite difference schemes satisfying the summation-by-parts property on the cube sphere grid, secondly finite volume discretizations on unstructured grids with polygonal cells. Furthermore, we also implement the seventh order accurate weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO7) scheme for the cube sphere grid. For the finite difference approximation, we prove a stability estimate, derived from projection boundary conditions. For the finite volume method, we develop the implementational details by working in a local coordinate system at each cell. We apply the schemes to compute advection on a sphere, which is a well established test problem. We compare the performance of the methods with respect to accuracy, computational efficiency, and ability to capture discontinuities.     

Achieving high-order fluctuation splitting schemes by extending the stencil

An extension to the fluctuation splitting approach for approximating hyperbolic conservation laws is described, which achieves higher than second-order accuracy in both space and time by extending the range of the distribution of the fluctuations. Initial results are presented for a simple linear scheme which is third-order accurate in both space and time on uniform triangular grids. Numerically induced oscillations are suppressed by applying the flux-corrected transport algorithm. These schemes are evaluated in the context of existing fluctuation splitting approaches to modelling time-dependent flows and some suggestions for their future development are made.     

High Order Fast Sweeping Methods for Static Hamilton–Jacobi Equations

We construct high order fast sweeping numerical methods for computing viscosity solutions of static Hamilton–Jacobi equations on rectangular grids. These methods combine high order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) approximations to derivatives, monotone numerical Hamiltonians and Gauss–Seidel iterations with alternating-direction sweepings. Based on well-developed first order sweeping methods, we design a novel approach to incorporate high order approximations to derivatives into numerical Hamiltonians such that the resulting numerical schemes are formally high order accurate and inherit the fast convergence from the alternating sweeping strategy. Extensive numerical examples verify efficiency, convergence and high order accuracy of the new methods.     

Moment preserving schemes for Euler equations

A high order accurate finite difference scheme is proposed for one-dimensional Euler equations. In the scheme a set of first three moments of each signal are preserved during the updating. The scheme is one of 5th order in space and 4th order in time. This feature is different from that in typical existing methods in which the use of the first three polynomials results in only 3rd order accuracy in space. The scheme has different features from the existing high order schemes, and the most noticeable are the simultaneous discretization both in space and time, and the use of moments of Riemann invariants instead of primitive physical variables. Numerical examples are given to show the accuracy of the scheme and its robustness for the flows involving shocks.     

Second-order-accurate explicit fluctuation splitting schemes for unsteady problems

This paper is concerned with the issue of obtaining explicit fluctuation splitting schemes which achieve second-order accuracy in both space and time on an arbitrary unstructured triangular mesh. A theoretical analysis demonstrates that, for a linear reconstruction of the solution, mass lumping does not diminish the accuracy of the scheme provided that a Galerkin space discretization is employed. Thus, two explicit fluctuation splitting schemes are devised which are second-order accurate in both space and time, namely, the well known Lax-Wendroff scheme and a Lax-Wendroff-type scheme using a three-point-backward discretization of the time derivative. A thorough mesh-refinement study verifies the theoretical order of accuracy of the two schemes on meshes with increasing levels of nonuniformity.     

Implicit–Explicit Schemes for BGK Kinetic Equations

In this work a new class of numerical methods for the BGK model of kinetic equations is presented. In principle, schemes of any order of accuracy in both space and time can be constructed with this technique. The methods proposed are based on an explicit–implicit time discretization. In particular the convective terms are treated explicitly, while the source terms are implicit. In this fashion even problems with infinite stiffness can be integrated with relatively large time steps. The conservation properties of the schemes are investigated. Numerical results are shown for schemes of order 1, 2 and 5 in space, and up to third-order accurate in time.     

ADER: Arbitrary High Order Godunov Approach

This paper concerns the construction of non-oscillatory schemes of very high order of accuracy in space and time, to solve non-linear hyperbolic conservation laws. The schemes result from extending the ADER approach, which is related to the ENO/WENO methodology. Our schemes are conservative, one-step, explicit and fully discrete, requiring only the computation of the inter-cell fluxes to advance the solution by a full time step; the schemes have optimal stability condition. To compute the intercell flux in one space dimension we solve a generalised Riemann problem by reducing it to the solution a sequence of m conventional Riemann problems for the kth spatial derivatives of the solution, with k=0, 1,..., m–1, where m is arbitrary and is the order of the accuracy of the resulting scheme. We provide numerical examples using schemes of up to fifth order of accuracy in both time and space.     

Implicit space–time residual distribution method for unsteady laminar viscous flow

The class of multidimensional upwind residual distribution (RD) schemes has been developed in the past decades as an attractive alternative to the finite volume (FV) and finite element (FE) approaches. Although they have shown superior performances in the simulation of steady two-dimensional and three-dimensional inviscid and viscous flows, their extension to the simulation of unsteady flow fields is still a topic of intense research [ICCFD2, International Conference on Computational Fluid Dynamics 2, Sydney, Australia, 15–19 July 2002; M. Mezine, R. Abgrall, Upwind multidimensional residual schemes for steady and unsteady flows].Recently the space–time RD approach has been developed by several researchers [Int. J. Numer. Methods Fluids 40 (2002) 573; J. Comput. Phys. 188 (2003) 16; Á.G. Csı́k, Upwind residual distribution schemes for general hyperbolic conservation laws and application to ideal magnetohydrodynamics, PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2002; J. Comput. Phys. 188 (2003) 16; R. Abgrall; M. Mezine, Construction of second order accurate monotone and stable residual distribution schemes for unsteady flow problems] which allows to perform second order accurate unsteady inviscid computations. In this paper we follow the work done in [Int. J. Numer. Methods Fluids 40 (2002) 573; Á.G. Csı́k, Upwind residual distribution schemes for general hyperbolic conservation laws and application to ideal magnetohydrodynamics, PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2002]. In this approach the space–time domain is discretized and solved as a (d+1)-dimensional problem, where d is the number of space dimensions. In [Int. J. Numer. Methods Fluids 40 (2002) 573; Á.G. Csı́k, Upwind residual distribution schemes for general hyperbolic conservation laws and application to ideal magnetohydrodynamics, PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2002] it is shown that thanks to the multidimensional upwinding of the RD method, the solution of the unsteady problem can be decoupled into sub-problems on space–time slabs composed of simplicial elements, allowing to obtain a true time marching procedure. Moreover, the method is implicit and unconditionally stable for arbitrary large time-steps if positive RD schemes are employed.We present further development of the space–time approach of [Int. J. Numer. Methods Fluids 40 (2002) 573; Á.G. Csı́k, Upwind residual distribution schemes for general hyperbolic conservation laws and application to ideal magnetohydrodynamics, PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2002] by extending it to laminar viscous flow computations. A Petrov–Galerkin treatment of the viscous terms [Project Report 2002-06, von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Belgium, 2002; J. Dobeš, Implicit space–time method for laminar viscous flow], consistent with the space–time formulation has been investigated, implemented and tested. Second order accuracy in both space and time was observed on unstructured triangulation of the spatial domain.The solution is obtained at each time-step by solving an implicit non-linear system of equations. Here, following [Int. J. Numer. Methods Fluids 40 (2002) 573; Á.G. Csı́k, Upwind residual distribution schemes for general hyperbolic conservation laws and application to ideal magnetohydrodynamics, PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2002], we formulate the solution of this system as a steady state problem in a pseudo-time variable. We discuss the efficiency of an explicit Euler forward pseudo-time integrator compared to the implicit Euler. When applied to viscous computation, the implicit method has shown speed-ups of more than a factor 50 in terms of computational time.     

Dispersion-bounded numerical integration of the elastodynamic equations with cost-effective staggered schemes

Known procedures for designing numerical schemes for the integration of elastodynamic equations with explicit control over numerical dispersion are reviewed. In the literature, the analysis of such schemes has concentrated on the discrete space differentiators, and has neglected the role played by time discretization in the overall accuracy. In this paper we define a computational cost for a given dispersion error bound which fully includes the effect of temporal differencing. For some representative schemes based on leap-frog time marching, we provide an optimal operating point (time sampling rate and number of grid points per shortest wavelength) which minimizes the computational cost for a given dispersion error threshold. Based on this notion of cost, we introduce new optimal operators for staggered grids. Additionally, we introduce the notion of composite differentiators to design still more cost-effective schemes. The cost of the proposed schemes is shown to be less than that of known finite difference (FD) operators and compares favorably with pseudo-spectral (PS) algorithms. Numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the new operators.     

Accurate adaptive level set method and sharpening technique for three dimensional deforming interfaces

In this paper, we demonstrate improved accuracy of the level set method for resolving deforming interfaces by proposing two key elements: (1) accurate level set solutions on adapted Cartesian grids by judiciously choosing interpolation polynomials in regions of different grid levels and (2) enhanced re-initialization by an interface sharpening procedure. The level set equation is solved using a fifth order WENO scheme or a second order central differencing scheme depending on availability of uniform stencils at each grid point. Grid adaptation criteria are determined so that the Hamiltonian functions at nodes adjacent to interfaces are always calculated by the fifth order WENO scheme. This selective usage between the fifth order WENO and second order central differencing schemes is confirmed to give more accurate results compared to those in literature for standard test problems. In order to further improve accuracy especially near thin filaments, we suggest an artificial sharpening method, which is in a similar form with the conventional re-initialization method but utilizes sign of curvature instead of sign of the level set function. Consequently, volume loss due to numerical dissipation on thin filaments is remarkably reduced for the test problems.     

A High Order Compact Time/Space Finite Difference Scheme for the Wave Equation with Variable Speed of Sound

We consider fourth order accurate compact schemes, in both space and time, for the second order wave equation with a variable speed of sound. We demonstrate that usually this is much more efficient than lower order schemes despite being implicit and only conditionally stable. Fast time marching of the implicit scheme is accomplished by iterative methods such as conjugate gradient and multigrid. For conjugate gradient, an upper bound on the convergence rate of the iterations is obtained by eigenvalue analysis of the scheme. The implicit discretization technique is such that the spatial and temporal convergence orders can be adjusted independently of each other. In special cases, the spatial error dominates the problem, and then an unconditionally stable second order accurate scheme in time with fourth order accuracy in space is more efficient. Computations confirm the design convergence rate for the inhomogeneous, variable wave speed equation and also confirm the pollution effect for these time dependent problems.     

Simple and accurate scheme for fluid velocity interpolation for Eulerian-Lagrangian computation of dispersed flows in 3D curvilinear grids

Particle tracking in turbulent flows in complex domains requires accurate interpolation of the fluid velocity field. If grids are non-orthogonal and curvilinear, the most accurate available interpolation methods fail. We propose an accurate interpolation scheme based on Taylor series expansion of the local fluid velocity about the grid point nearest to the desired location. The scheme is best suited for curvilinear grids with non-orthogonal computational cells. We present the scheme with second-order accuracy, yet the order of accuracy of the method can be adapted to that of the Navier-Stokes solver.An application to particle dispersion in a turbulent wavy channel is presented, for which the scheme is tested against standard linear interpolation. Results show that significant discrepancies can arise in the particle displacement produced by the two schemes, particularly in the near-wall region which is often discretized with highly-distorted computational cells.     

A comparison of methods for interpolating chaotic flows from discrete velocity data

In this paper we consider a variety of schemes for performing interpolation in space and time to allow particle trajectories to be integrated from a velocity field given only on a discrete collection of data points in space and time. Using a widely-studied model of chaotic advection as a test case we give a method for quantifying the quality of interpolation methods and apply this to a variety of interpolation schemes in space only and in both space and time. It is shown that the performance of a method when interpolating in space is not a reliable predictor of its performance when interpolation in time is added. It is demonstrated that a method using bicubic spatial interpolation together with third-order Lagrange polynomials in time gives excellent accuracy at very modest computational expense compared to other methods.     

Staggered Finite Difference Schemes for Conservation Laws

In this work, we introduce new finite-difference shock-capturing central schemes on staggered grids. Staggered schemes may have better resolution of the corresponding unstaggered schemes of the same order. They are based on high-order nonoscillatory reconstruction (ENO or WENO), and a suitable ODE solver for the computation of the integral of the flux. Although they suffer from a more severe stability restriction, they do not require a numerical flux function. A comparison of the new schemes with high-order finite volume (on staggered and unstaggered grids) and high order unstaggered finite difference methods is reported.     

Computational models for weakly dispersive nonlinear water waves

Numerical methods for the two- and three-dimensional Boussinesq equations governing weakly nonlinear and dispersive water waves are presented and investigated. Convenient handling of grids adapted to the geometry or bottom topography is enabled by finite element discretization in space. Staggered finite difference schemes are used for the temporal discretization, resulting in only two linear systems to be solved during each time step. Efficient iterative solution of linear systems is discussed. By introducing correction terms in the equations, a fourth-order, two-level temporal scheme can be obtained. Combined with (bi-) quadratic finite elements, the truncation errors of this scheme can be made of the same order as the neglected perturbation terms in the analytical model, provided that the element size is of the same order as the characteristic depth. We present analysis of the proposed schemes in terms of numerical dispersion relations. Verification of the schemes and their implementations is performed for standing waves in a closed basin with constant depth. More challenging applications cover plane incoming waves on a curved beach and earthquake induced waves over a shallow seamount. In the latter example we demonstrate a significantly increased computational efficiency when using higher-order schemes and bathymetry-adapted finite element grids.     

Third-order accurate finite volume schemes for Euler computations on curvilinear meshes

After looking for a convenient definition of accuracy for finite-volume schemes on structured meshes, a high-order accurate scheme is constructed for the Euler equations. Thanks to suitably weighted discretization operators, the proposed scheme is third-order on mildly deformed grids and second-order on highly deformed grids. The influence of mesh deformations on the scheme accuracy is studied theoretically and numerically. Numerical results are shown for a Lamb vortex, subsonic flow past a cylinder and transonic flow past a NACA0012 airfoil.     

Finite Volume Approximation of One-Dimensional Stiff Convection-Diffusion Equations

In this work, we present a novel method to approximate stiff problems using a finite volume (FV) discretization. The stiffness is caused by the existence of a small parameter in the equation which introduces a boundary layer. The proposed semi-analytic method consists in adding in the finite volume space the boundary layer corrector which encompasses the singularities of the problem. We verify the stability and convergence of our finite volume schemes which take into account the boundary layer structures. A major feature of the proposed scheme is that it produces an efficient stable second order scheme to be compared with the usual stable upwind schemes of order one or the usual costly second order schemes demanding fine meshes.     

Application of Lagrange multipliers for coupled problems in fluid and structural interactions

One challenging aspect of the computation of multidisciplinary phenomenas is the accurate prediction of physical effects in space and time domain. The present paper focuses on the data transmission over non-matching grids. To fulfil energy conservation, a weak formulation of the continuity conditions on the common interface is used by introducing Lagrange multipliers. The coupling approach of the full system utilizes Hamilton’s principle. Several transfer schemes based on Galerkin’s method, dual-Lagrange multipliers, or the Sobolev-norm are presented. Two strategies to improve the accuracy of the transmission method are shown; namely use of merged mesh and quadtree-based h-refinement of the integration mesh. Simulations of an oscillating three-dimensional wing structure are presented to show the applicability and performance of the concepts. Further, computations of thin-walled structures with nonlinear behavior in transonic fluid flows are given. The impact of the presented transfer methods on the accuracy of the results are discussed.