Discontinuous Galerkin method for solving incompressible two-phase shallow granular flow model

Abstract

This article deals with the numerical study of two-phase shallow flow model describing the mixture of fluid and solid granular particles. The model under investigation consists of coupled mass and momentum equations for solid granular material and fluid particles through non-conservative momentum exchange terms. The non-conservativity of model equations poses major challenges for any numerical scheme, such as well balancing, positivity preservation, accurate approximation of non-conservative terms, and achievement of steady-state conditions. Thus, in order to approximate the present model an accurate, well-balanced, robust, and efficient numerical scheme is required. For this purpose, in this article, Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method is applied successfully for the first time to solve the model equations. Several test problems are also carried out to check the performance and accuracy of our proposed numerical method. To compare the results, the same model is solved by staggered central Nessyahu–Tadmor scheme. A good comparison is found between two schemes, but the results obtained by Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin scheme are found superior over the central Nessyahu–Tadmor scheme.