Optimal local truncation error method on unfitted Cartesian meshes for solution of 3-D wave and heat equations for heterogeneous materials

Abstract

In the paper we develop the optimal local truncation error method (OLTEM) with the non-diagonal and diagonal mass matrices on unfitted Cartesian meshes for the 3-D time-dependent wave and heat equations for heterogeneous materials with irregular interfaces. 27-point stencils that are similar to those for linear finite elements are used with OLTEM. There are no unknowns for OLTEM on interfaces between different materials; the structure of the global discrete equations is the same for homogeneous and heterogeneous materials. The calculation of the unknown stencil coefficients is based on the minimization of the local truncation error of the stencil equations, includes the use of the interface conditions and the entire PDE in derivations, and yields the optimal fourth order of accuracy of OLTEM with the non-diagonal mass matrix. This is two order higher than for linear finite elements with similar 27-point stencils. OLTEM with the diagonal mass matrix includes the rigorous calculation of the diagonal mass matrix and provides the optimal second order of accuracy. The 3-D numerical results for heterogeneous materials with irregular interfaces show that at the same number of degrees of freedom, OLTEM is even much more accurate than high-order (up to the 7-th order - the highest order in the commercial code COMSOL) finite elements with much wider stencils. Compared to linear finite elements with similar 27-point stencils, at an accuracy of 0.1% OLTEM decreases the number of degrees of freedom by 550–7300 times. This leads to a huge reduction in computation time.A new 3-D post-processing procedure has been developed with OLTEM for the calculation of the spatial derivatives of time-dependent numerical solutions. The spatial derivatives for each grid point are calculated with the help of one compact 27-point stencil (the same as that in basic computations). In contrast to known post-processing procedures, the new approach includes also the use of the time derivatives of the function, the interface conditions and the original PDE. The spatial derivatives of the OLTEM solutions calculated with the new post-processing procedure are much more accurate compared to those obtained by high-order (up to the 7-th order) finite elements with much wider stencils. At an accuracy of 0.1% for the spatial derivatives, OLTEM decreases the number of degrees of freedom by 1.9⋅106–6⋅109 times compared to linear finite elements. The new post-processing procedure can be equally applied to the calculation of the partial derivatives obtained by other numerical methods as well as to the numerical results for other PDEs.Due to the huge reduction in the computation time compared to existing methods and the use of trivial unfitted Cartesian meshes that are independent of irregular geometry, the proposed technique does not require remeshing for the shape change of irregular geometry and it will be effective for many design and optimization problems as well as for multiscale problems without the scale separation.