An enriched Galerkin-characteristics finite element method for convection-dominated and transport problems

Abstract

We propose an enriched Galerkin-characteristics finite element method for numerical solution of convection-dominated problems. The method uses the modified method of characteristics for the integration of the total derivative in time, combined with the finite element method for the spatial discretization on unstructured grids. The L2-projection method is implemented for the evaluation of numerical solutions by tracking the departure points from the integration points in each element. In the present study, a family of quadrature rules are used to enrich the approximation of integrals in the L2-projection method. The use of quadrature rules as an enrichment procedure allows for spatial discretizations on coarse fixed meshes and no need to introduce time-dependent enrichments. This procedure offers a very great advantage over the conventional Galerkin-characteristics finite element method since the same governing matrix representation can be used during the entire time steeping process. We also propose a multilevel adaptive procedure in the enriched Galerkin-characteristics finite element method by monitoring the gradient of the solution in the computational domain during its advection. In comparison with the traditional finite element analysis with h-, p- and hp-version refinements, the present approach is much simpler, more robust and efficient, and it yields more accurate solutions for a fixed number of degrees of freedom without refining the mesh. To examine the performance of the proposed method we solve several test examples for convection-diffusion problems. Comparison to the conventional Galerkin-characteristics finite element method is also carried out in the present work. The aim of such enriched method compared to the classical finite element method is to solve the time-dependent convection-dominated problems efficiently and with an appropriate level of accuracy.