Inflow-implicit/outflow-explicit finite volume methods for solving advection equations

Abstract

We introduce a new class of methods for solving non-stationary advection equations. The new methods are based on finite volume space discretizations and a semi-implicit discretization in time. Its basic idea is that outflow from a cell is treated explicitly while inflow is treated implicitly. This is natural, since we know what is outflowing from a cell at the old time step but we leave the method to resolve a system of equations determined by the inflows to a cell to obtain the solution values at the new time step. The matrix of the system in our inflow-implicit/outflow-explicit (IIOE) method is determined by the inflow fluxes which results in an M-matrix yielding favorable stability properties for the scheme. Since the explicit (outflow) part is not always dominated by the implicit (inflow) part and thus some oscillations can occur, we build a stabilization based on the upstream weighted averages with coefficients determined by the flux-corrected transport approach [2,19] yielding high resolution versions, S1IIOE and S2IIOE, of the basic scheme. We prove that our new method is exact for any choice of a discrete time step on uniform rectangular grids in the case of constant velocity transport of quadratic functions in any dimension. We also show its formal second order accuracy in space and time for 1D advection problems with variable velocity. Although designed for non-divergence free velocity fields, we show that the basic IIOE scheme is locally mass conservative in case of divergence free velocity. Finally, we show L2-stability for divergence free velocity in 1D on periodic domains independent of the choice of the time step, and L∞-stability for the stabilized high resolution variant of the scheme. Numerical comparisons with the purely explicit schemes like the fully explicit up-wind and the Lax–Wendroff schemes were discussed in [13] and [14] where the basic IIOE was originally introduced. There it has been shown that the new scheme has good properties with respect to a balance of precision and CPU time related to a possible choice of larger time steps in our scheme. In this contribution we compare the new scheme and its stabilized variants with widely used fully implicit up-wind method. In this comparison our new schemes show better behavior with respect to stability and precision of computations for time steps several times exceeding the CFL stability condition. Our new stabilized methods are L∞ stable, second order accurate for any smooth solution and with accuracy of order 2/3 for solutions with moving discontinuities. This is opposite to implicit up-wind schemes which have accuracy order 1/2 only. All these properties hold for any choice of time step thus making our new method attractive for practical applications.