FSUMATH
Florida State University Seal

Xiangxiong Zhang


MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIUM

Speaker: Xiangxiong Zhang
Title: Positivity-Preserving High Order Accurate Schemes for Hyperbolic Conservation Laws
Affiliation: MIT
Date: Friday, January 31, 2014
Place and Time: Room 101, Love Building, 3:35-4:30 pm
Refreshments: Room 204, Love Building, 3:00 pm

Abstract. We will discuss the construction of arbitrarily high order accurate schemes which satisfy a strict maximum principle for nonlinear scalar conservation laws, passive convection in incompressible flows, and preserve positivity of density and pressure for compressible Euler equations in gas dynamics. Take gas dynamics equations for an example, the L1-stability of mass and energy can be achieved by enforcing the positivity of density and pressure during the time evolution. The main difficulty is how to enforce the positivity without destroying the high order accuracy and the local conservation, which was unknown previously regarding higher than second order accurate schemes. For discontinuous Galerkin (DG) and weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) finite volume (FV) schemes, a general framework (for any order of accuracy and unstructured meshes in any dimension) is established to construct a simple scaling limiter involving only the polynomial solution at certain quadrature points. This is the first time that a genuinely high order positivity-preserving scheme is constructed in high dimensions. The additional computational cost due to the limiter is marginal and the limiter does not affect the parallelizability of the base scheme. Some recent extensions will be briefly discussed.