An Unconditionally Stable Fully Conservative Semi-Lagrangian Method (PREPRINT)

Abstract

Semi-Lagrangian methods have been around for some time, dating back at least to [3]. Researchers have worked to increase their accuracy, and these schemes have gained newfound interest with the recent widespread use of adaptive grids where the CFL-based time step restriction of the smallest cell can be overwhelming. Since these schemes are based on characteristic tracing and interpolation, they do not readily lend themselves to a fully conservative implementation. However, we propose a novel technique that applies a conservative limiter to the typical semi-Lagrangian interpolation step in order to guarantee that the amount of the conservative quantity does not increase during this advection. In addition, we propose a new second step that forward advects any of the conserved quantity that was not accounted for in the typical semi-Lagrangian advection. We show that this new scheme can be used to conserve both mass and momentum for incompressible flows. For incompressible flows, we further explore properly conserving kinetic energy during the advection step, but note that the divergence free projection results in a velocity field which is inconsistent with conservation of kinetic energy (even for inviscid flows where it should be conserved). For compressible flows we rely on a recently proposed splitting technique that eliminates the acoustic CFL time step restriction via an incompressible-style pressure solve. Then our new method can be applied to conservatively advect mass momentum and total energy in order to exactly conserve these quantities, and remove the remaining time step restriction based on fluid velocity that the original scheme still had.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 07, 2010
Accession Number
ADA528401

Entities

People

  • Jon T. Gretarsson
  • Michael Lentine
  • Ronald Fedkiw

Organizations

  • Stanford University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Advection
  • Compressible Flow
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Energy
  • Equations
  • Flow
  • Flow Visualization
  • Fluid Flow
  • Incompressible Flow
  • Interpolation
  • Inviscid Flow
  • Kinetic Energy
  • Momentum
  • Simulations
  • Sine Waves
  • Stratified Fluids

Readers

  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)
  • Theoretical Analysis.