Well-balanced Central-upwind Schemes
Description
Flux gradient terms and source terms are two fundamental components of hyperbolic systems of balance law. Though having distinct mathematical natures, they form and maintain an exact balance in a special class of solutions, which are called steady-state solutions. In this dissertation, we are interested in the construction of well-balanced schemes, which are the numerical methods for hyperbolic systems of balance laws that are capable of exactly preserving steady-state solutions on the discrete level. We first introduce a well-balanced scheme for the Euler equations of gas dynamics with gravitation. The well-balanced property of the designed scheme hinges on a reconstruction process applied to equilibrium variables---the quantities that stay constant at steady states. In addition, the amount of numerical viscosity is reduced in the areas where the flow is in (near) steady-state regime, so that the numerical solutions under consideration can be evolved in a well-balanced manner. We then consider the shallow water equations with friction terms, which become very stiff when the water height is close to zero. The stiffness in the friction terms introduces additional difficulty for designing an efficient well-balanced scheme. If treated explicitly, the stiff friction terms impose a severe restriction on the time step. On the other hand, a straightforward (semi-) implicit treatment of the stiff friction terms can greatly enhance the efficiency, but will break the well-balanced property of the resulting scheme. To this end, we develop a new semi-implicit Runge-Kutta time integration method that is capable of maintaining the well-balanced property under the time step restriction determined exclusively by non-stiff components in the underlying equations. The well-balanced property of our schemes are tested and verified by extensive numerical simulations, and notably, the obtained numerical results clearly indicate that the well-balanced property plays an important role in achieving high resolutions when a coarse grid is used.