An absolutely convergent fixed-point fast sweeping WENO method on triangular meshes for steady state of hyperbolic conservation laws

Abstract

High order accuracy fast sweeping methods have been developed in the literature to efficiently solve steady state solutions of hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs) on rectangular meshes, while they were not available yet on unstructured meshes. In this paper, we extend high order accuracy fast sweeping methods to unstructured triangular meshes by applying fixed-point iterative sweeping techniques to a fifth-order finite volume unstructured WENO scheme, for solving steady state solutions of hyperbolic conservation laws. Similar as other fast sweeping methods, fixed-point fast sweeping methods use the Gauss-Seidel iterations and alternating sweeping strategy to cover characteristics of hyperbolic PDEs in each sweeping order to achieve fast convergence rate to steady state solutions. An advantage of fixed-point fast sweeping methods which distinguishes them from other fast sweeping methods is that they are explicit and do not require inverse operation of nonlinear local systems. This also provides certain convenience in designing high order fast sweeping methods on unstructured meshes. As in the first order fast sweeping methods on triangular meshes, we introduce multiple reference points to determine alternating sweeping directions on unstructured meshes. All the cells on the mesh are ordered according to their centroids' distances to those reference points, and the resulted orderings provide sweeping directions for iterations. To make the residue of the fast sweeping iterations converge to machine zero / round off errors, we follow the approach in our early work of developing the absolutely convergent fixed-point fast sweeping WENO methods on rectangular meshes, and adopt high order WENO scheme with unequal-sized sub-stencils, specifically here a fifth-order finite volume unstructured WENO scheme for spatial discretization. Extensive numerical experiments, including problems with complex domain geometries, are performed to show the accuracy, computational efficiency, and absolute convergence of the presented fifth-order fast sweeping scheme on triangular meshes. Furthermore, the proposed method is compared with the forward Euler time marching method and the popular third order total variation diminishing Rung-Kutta (TVD-RK3) time-marching method for steady state computations. Numerical examples show that the developed fixed-point fast sweeping WENO method is the most efficient scheme among them, and especially it can save up to 70% CPU time costs than TVD-RK3 in order to converge to steady state solutions.