A Time-Centered Split for Implicit Discretization of Unsteady
Advection Problems
Shipeng Fu, B.S.; M.S., Ben R. Hodges, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT
Environmental flows (e.g. river and atmospheric flows) governed by the shallow
water equations (SWE) are usually dominated by the advective mechanism over multiple
time-scales. The combination of time dependency and nonlinear advection creates
difficulties in the numerical solution of the SWE. A fully-implicit scheme is desirable
because a relatively large time step may be used in a simulation. However, nonlinearity in
a fully implicit method results in a system of nonlinear equations to be solved at each
time step. To address this difficulty, a new method for implicit solution of unsteady
nonlinear advection equations is developed in this research. This Time-Centered Split
(TCS) method uses a nested application of the midpoint rule to computationally decouple
advection terms in a temporally second-order accurate time-marching discretization. The
method requires solution of only two sets of linear equations without an outer iteration,
and is theoretically applicable to quadratically-nonlinear coupled equations for any
number of variables.
To explore its characteristics, the TCS algorithm is first applied to onedimensional
problems and compared to the conventional nonlinear solution methods.
The temporal accuracy and practical stability of the method is confirmed using these 1D
examples. It is shown that TCS can computationally linearize unsteady nonlinear
advection problems without either 1) outer iteration or 2) calculation of the Jacobian. A
family of the TCS method is created in one general form by introducing weighting factors
to different terms. We prove both analytically and by examples that the value of the
weighting factors does not affect the order of accuracy of the scheme. In addition, the
TCS method can not only computationally linearize but also decouple an equation system
of coupled variables using special combinations of weighting factors. Hence, the TCS
method provides flexibilities and efficiency in applications.
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