A symmetric characteristic finite volume element scheme for nonlinear convection-diffusion problems

Abstract

In this paper, we implement alternating direction strategy and construct a symmetric FVE scheme for nonlinear convection-diffusion problems. Comparing to general FVE methods, our method has two advantages. First, the coefficient matrices of the discrete schemes will be symmetric even for nonlinear problems. Second, since the solution of the algebraic equations at each time step can be inverted into the solution of several one-dimensional problems, the amount of computation work is smaller. We prove the optimal H1-norm error estimates of order O(Δt2 + h) and present some numerical examples at the end of the paper.