Computing Locally-Mass-Conservative Fluxes from Multi-dimensional Finite Element Flow Simulations
Abstract
Conserving local mass in the finite volume (FV) sense, where the sum of face fluxes equal to the rate of change of storage within each element/cell, is essential in computing water flow and contaminant transport. Although the continuous Galerkin finite element (FE) method does not yield locally conservative flux approximation directly, Berger and Howington showed that, by remaining consistent with the discrete approximation given by the FE statement, the resulting flux estimates will preserve mass balance [1]. Passing conservative water flux through each element edge/face from flow models to transport models is critical for accurate simulation and analysis. At the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), most water flow models employ the FE method, while many contaminant transport models use the FV method. The computation of locally-conservative water flux through each elemental edge/face has thus become necessary for passing FE-based water flux to FV-based contaminant transport models. This technical note describes how, from multi-dimensional FE-based flow simulations, we computed locally-mass-conservative fluxes to hand-off to FV-based models and to eliminate apparent flux jumps on element boundaries for particle tracking.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA527851
Entities
People
- Christopher E Kees
- Hwai-ping Cheng
- Jing-ru C. Cheng
- Matthew W. Farthing
Organizations
- Engineer Research and Development Center