Laplacian regularized eikonal equation with Soner boundary condition on polyhedral meshes

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a numerical algorithm based on a cell-centered finite volume method to compute a distance from given objects on a three-dimensional computational domain discretized by polyhedral cells. Inspired by the vanishing viscosity method, a Laplacian regularized eikonal equation is solved and the Soner boundary condition is applied to the boundary of the domain to avoid a non-viscosity solution. As the regularization parameter depending on a characteristic length of the discretized domain is reduced, a corresponding numerical solution is calculated. A convergence to the viscosity solution is verified numerically as the characteristic length becomes smaller and the regularization parameter accordingly becomes smaller. From the numerical experiments, the second experimental order of convergence in the L1 norm error is confirmed for smooth solutions. Compared to solve a time-dependent form of the eikonal equation, the Laplacian regularized eikonal equation has the advantage of reducing computational cost dramatically when a more significant number of cells is used or a region of interest is far away from the given objects. The implementation of parallel computing using domain decomposition with 1-ring face neighborhood structure can be done straightforwardly by a standard cell-centered finite volume code.