High order cell-centered Lagrangian-type finite volume schemes with time-accurate local time stepping on unstructured triangular meshes

Abstract

We present a novel cell-centered direct Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) finite volume scheme on unstructured triangular meshes that is high order accurate in space and time and that also allows for time-accurate local time stepping (LTS). It extends our previous investigations on high order Lagrangian finite volume schemes with LTS carried out in [46] in one space dimension. The new scheme uses the following basic ingredients: a high order WENO reconstruction in space on unstructured meshes, an element-local high-order accurate space-time Galerkin predictor that performs the time evolution of the reconstructed polynomials within each element, the computation of numerical ALE fluxes at the moving element interfaces through approximate Riemann solvers, and a one-step finite volume scheme for the time update which is directly based on the integral form of the conservation equations in space-time. The inclusion of the LTS algorithm requires a number of crucial extensions, such as a proper scheduling criterion for the time update of each element and for each node; a virtual projection of the elements contained in the reconstruction stencils of the element that has to perform the WENO reconstruction; and the proper computation of the fluxes through the space-time boundary surfaces that will inevitably contain hanging nodes in time due to the LTS algorithm. We have validated our new unstructured Lagrangian LTS approach over a wide sample of test cases solving the Euler equations of compressible gas dynamics in two space dimensions, including shock tube problems, cylindrical explosion problems, as well as specific tests typically adopted in Lagrangian calculations, such as the Kidder, the Saltzman and the Sedov problem. When compared to the traditional global time stepping (GTS) method, the newly proposed LTS algorithm allows to reduce the number of element updates in a given simulation by a factor that may depend on the complexity of the dynamics, but which can be as large as ~4.7. Finally, we have also shown the improvement in terms of computational efficiency in a representative test for the special relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (RMHD) equations