On high order positivity-preserving well-balanced finite volume methods for the Euler equations with gravitation

Abstract

This paper studies three high-order structure-preserving finite volume weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) methods, which are not only well balanced (WB) for a general known hydrostatic equilibrium state but also preserve the positivity of density and pressure, for the compressible Euler equations under gravitational fields. These methods are built on a simple local scaling positivity-preserving (PP) limiter and a modified WENO-ZQ reconstruction exactly preserving the cell average value and scaling invariance. The WB properties of these three methods are achieved based on suitable numerical fluxes and approximation to the gravitational source terms. Based on some convex decomposition techniques as well as several critical properties of the admissible states and numerical flux, we carry out rigorous positivity-preserving analyses for these three WB schemes. We rigorously prove that the three WB methods, coupled with the PP limiter and a strong-stability-preserving time discretization, are always PP under suitable Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy conditions. Extensive numerical examples are provided to confirm WB and PP properties of three methods.