Weighted positive nonlinear finite volume method for dominated anisotropic diffusive equations (Q2108973)

The authors developed a new nonlinear finite volume element scheme approximating the positive solution of a degenerate parabolic equation. Two meshes are built, a primal conforming finite element mesh and a dual mesh. The dual mesh is made using the control volumes. The diffusion tensor can be highly heterogeneous and strongly anisotropic. One of the main results is the construction of the flux approximation. For the diffusive function, it uses a weighted harmonic mean instead of the standard upwinding choice with a two-point flux structure. A parameter is introduced to control the effects of the artificial diffusion introduced by the method. As a result, the positivity of the solution holds by construction. In addition, the scheme satisfies stability results, namely the energy estimates which yield the existence of numerical solutions. Using some compactness arguments, the convergence of the numerical scheme is proved. Several numerical tests are presented to show the robustness and the efficiency of the proposed scheme compared to to some known schemes.