A nonlinear scheme preserving maximum principle for heterogeneous anisotropic diffusion equation

Abstract

We present a new nonlinear method in order to preserve the maximum principle for the diffusion problem with heterogeneous anisotropic coefficient. It is well-known that for diffusion problems with general discontinuous coefficients, the existing cell-centered finite volume schemes on general meshes cannot unconditionally satisfy the discrete maximum principle (DMP), i.e., there are always certain severe restrictions on the mesh-cell geometry or locations of discontinuity in order to preserve DMP. To deal with the issue we propose a nonlinear method of modifying discrete flux of linear second-order schemes into a new conservative flux. Then the resulting scheme keeps conservation and accuracy, and has the structure preserving maximum principle without imposing those severe restrictions. Specifically, we will start with the diamond scheme whose flux is linear and has second-order accuracy, but has no the structure preserving maximum principle. Then the nonlinear correction method is applied to get a scheme satisfying the discrete maximum principle unconditionally. We give some theoretical analysis including the coercivity property and a prior estimation. Numerical results show that the accuracy of our new scheme is superior to the existing scheme preserving maximum principle, and in some cases the accuracy can even be improved by one order of magnitude.