A Third-Order Scheme for Numerical Fluxes to Guarantee Non-Negative Coefficients for Advection-Diffusion Equations

Abstract

According to Godunov theorem for numerical calculations of advection equations, there exist no higher-order schemes with constant positive difference coefficients in a family of polynomial schemes with an accuracy exceeding the first-order. In case of advection-diffusion equations, so far there have been not found stable schemes with positive difference coefficients in a family of numerical schemes exceeding the second-order accuracy. We propose a third-order computational scheme for numerical fluxes to guarantee the non-negative difference coefficients of resulting finite difference equations for advection-diffusion equations. The present scheme is optimized so as to minimize truncation errors for the numerical fluxes while fulfilling the positivity condition of the difference coefficients which are variable depending on the local Courant number and diffusion number. The feature of the present optimized scheme consists in keeping the third-order accuracy anywhere without any numerical flux limiter by using the same stencil number as convemtional third-order shemes such as KAWAMURA and UTOPIA schemes. We extend the present method into multi-dimensional equations. Numerical experiments for linear and nonlinear advection-diffusion equations were performed and the present scheme’s applicability to nonlinear Burger’s equation was confirmed.