An efficient algorithm for characteristic tracking on two-dimensional triangular meshes

Tracking characteristics on unstructured meshes is an important part of many numerical methods in computational fluid mechanics. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for characteristic tracking on two-dimensional unstructured triangular meshes. Numerical experiments, including an example for applying this algorithm with the Eulerian-Lagrangian localized adjoint method (ELLAM) to solve a convection-dominated convection-diffusion problem, are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of this algorithm.