Fast Sparse Grid Simulations of Fifth Order WENO Scheme for High Dimensional Hyperbolic PDEs

Abstract

The weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes, especially the fifth order WENO schemes, are a popular class of high order accurate numerical methods for solving hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs). However when the spatial dimensions are high, the number of spatial grid points increases significantly. It leads to large amount of operations and computational costs in the numerical simulations by using nonlinear high order accuracy WENO schemes such as a fifth order WENO scheme. How to achieve fast simulations by high order WENO methods for high spatial dimension hyperbolic PDEs is a challenging and important question. In the literature, sparse-grid technique has been developed as a very efficient approximation tool for high dimensional problems. In a recent work [Lu, Chen and Zhang, Pure and Applied Mathematics Quarterly, 14 (2018) 57-86], a third order finite difference WENO method with sparse-grid combination technique was designed to solve multidimensional hyperbolic equations including both linear advection equations and nonlinear Burgers’ equations. Numerical experiments showed that WENO computations on sparse grids achieved comparable third order accuracy in smooth regions of the solutions and nonlinear stability as that for computations on regular single grids. In application problems, higher than third order WENO schemes are often preferred in order to efficiently resolve the complex solution structures. In this paper, we extend the approach to higher order WENO simulations specifically the fifth order WENO scheme. A fifth order WENO interpolation is applied in the prolongation part of the sparse-grid combination technique to deal with discontinuous solutions. Benchmark problems are first solved to show that significant CPU times are saved while both fifth order accuracy and stability of the WENO scheme are preserved for simulations on sparse grids. The fifth order sparse grid WENO method is then applied to kinetic problems modeled by high dimensional Vlasov based PDEs to further demonstrate large savings of computational costs by comparing with simulations on regular single grids. Several open problems are discussed at last.