Central schemes on overlapping cells (Q2485672)

A new technique to control the dissipative error of the staggered central finite-difference schemes is introduced. The major idea is to introduce an overlapping cell representation of the solution. An immediate advantage is that the time discretization becomes simple by the use of total variation diminishing Runge-Kutta methods. Also by using a time step size dependent convex combination of the overlapping cell averages, the \(O\left({{1 \mathord{\left/{\vphantom {1{\Delta t}}}\right. \kern-\nulldelimiterspace} {\Delta t}}} \right)\) dependent dissipative error can be easily controlled. Although the use of overlapping cells generally doubles the computational cost, more efficient reconstruction methods using the combined information from the overlapping cell averages could improve the resolution. In Section 2, the 1D formulations of the central schemes on overlapping cells and the technique to control the dissipative error related to the small time step size are introduced. In Section 3, the application to convection-diffusion equations for which the small time step size is usually required for explicit schemes is discussed. The reconstruction procedures for 1D overlapping cells are discussed in Section 4. In Section 5, the author extends the techniques to 2D. 1D and 2D numerical examples are given in Section 6.