A numerical study of the convergence properties of ENO schemes

We report numerical results obtained with finite difference ENO schemes for the model problem of the linear convection equation with periodic boundary conditions. For the test function sin(x), the spatial and temporal errors decrease at the rate expected from the order of local truncation errors as the discretization is refined. If we take sin⁴(x) as our test function, however, we find that the numerical solution does not converge uniformly and that an improved discretization can result in larger errors. This difficulty is traced back to the linear stability characteristics of the individual stencils employed by the ENO algorithm. If we modify the algorithm to prevent the use of linearly unstable stencils, the proper rate of convergence is reestablished. The way toward recovering the correct order of accuracy of ENO schemes appears to involve a combination of fixed stencils in smooth regions and ENO stencils in regions of strong gradients —a concept that is developed in detail in a companion paper by Shu (this issue, 1990).