Smoothing and the second law (Q1085700)

The technique of obtaining second-order, oscillation-free, total variation diminishing (TVD), scalar difference schemes by adding a limited diffusive flux ('smoothing') to a second-order centered scheme is explored. It is shown that such schemes do not always converge to the correct physical answer. The approach presented here is to construct schemes that numerically satisfy the second law of thermodynamics on a cell-by-cell basis. Such schemes can only converge to the correct physical solution and in some cases can shown to be TVD. An explicit scheme with this property and second-order spatial accuracy was found to have an extremely restrictive time step limitation. Switching to an implicit scheme removed the time step limitation.