Central WENO schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws on fixed and moving unstructured meshes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-order, efficient, and easily implementable central WENO reconstruction method for solving hyperbolic conservation laws on unstructured meshes, suitable for large-scale parallel computations.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel CWENO scheme with minimal stencil size, flexible linear weights, and demonstrated efficiency on large-scale parallel supercomputers.

Findings

More memory-efficient than classical WENO schemes.

Achieved high accuracy on 2D and 3D hyperbolic systems.

Successfully run simulations with over one billion degrees of freedom.

Abstract

We present a novel arbitrary high order accurate central WENO spatial reconstruction procedure (CWENO) for the solution of nonlinear systems of hyperbolic conservation laws on fixed and moving unstructured simplex meshes in two and three space dimensions. Starting from the given cell averages of a function on a triangular or tetrahedral control volume and its neighbors, the nonlinear CWENO reconstruction yields a high order accurate and essentially non-oscillatory polynomial that is defined everywhere in the cell. Compared to other WENO schemes on unstructured meshes, the total stencil size is the minimum possible one, as in classical point-wise WENO schemes of Jiang and Shu. However, the linear weights can be chosen arbitrarily, which makes the practical implementation on general unstructured meshes particularly simple. We make use of the piecewise polynomials generated by the CWENO reconstruction operator inside the framework of fully discrete and high order accurate one-step ADER finite volume schemes on fixed Eulerian grids as well as on moving Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) meshes. The computational efficiency of the high order finite volume schemes based on the new CWENO reconstruction is tested on several two- and three-dimensional systems of hyperbolic conservation laws and is found to be more efficient in terms of memory consumption and computational efficiency with respect to classical WENO reconstruction schemes on unstructured meshes. We also provide evidence that the new algorithm is suitable for implementation on massively parallel distributed memory supercomputers, showing two numerical examples run with more than one billion degrees of freedom in space. To our knowledge, at present these are the largest simulations ever run with unstructured WENO finite volume schemes.