A positivity-preserving RD-FV scheme for diffusion problems on triangular meshes

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a positivity-preserving residual distribution based finite volume scheme (RD-FV) for steady diffusion problems on unstructured triangular meshes. In this scheme, we use the RD method to obtain the auxiliary values of vertex, then adopt the positivity-preserving finite volume scheme to update the cell-centered values for diffusion problems, in which a nonlinear two-point flux approximation is utilized to obtain nonnegative solution. Thus a positivity-preserving conservative property for the RD-FV scheme is guaranteed. Several numerical experiments show the optimal convergence rates for the numerical solution, that is, approximate second-order accuracy for the solution and first-order accuracy for the flux, and demonstrate the positivity-preserving property of our new scheme.