Control of numerical effects of dispersion and dissipation in numerical schemes for efficient shock-capturing through an optimal Courant number

Composite schemes consist of several steps of a dispersive scheme followed by one step of a dissipative scheme [Liska Richard, Wendroff Burton. Composite schemes for conservation laws. SIAM J Numer Anal 1998;35(6):2250-71]. The latter [Liska Richard, Wendroff Burton. 2D shallow water equations by composite schemes. Int J Numer Meth Fluids 1999;30:461-79] acts as a filter reducing oscillations in regions of discontinuity. Liska and Wendroff have derived the composite Lax-Wendroff/Lax-Friedrielis (LWLF) [Liska Richard, Wendroff Burton, 1998] scheme which blends the Lax-Wendroff (LW) scheme with the 2-step Lax-Friedrichs (LF) scheme. The formulation of the 2-step Lax-Friedrichs scheme [Liska Richard, Wendroff Burton, 1998] is different from that of the classic Lax-Friedrichs scheme and has been devised by Liska [Liska Richard, Wendroff Burton, 1998]. In this work, we propose to replace LW scheme by MacCormack (MC) scheme since the latter is less dispersive. We obtain a new composite scheme in I-D and ill 2-D by blending the MacCormack scheme with the 2-step Lax-Friedrichs scheme which we term as the composite MacCormack/Lax-Friedrichs (MCLF) scheme. This is followed by analytical work on the effective amplification factor (EAF) and the relative phase error (RPE) for both families of schemes in 1-D and 2-D: LWLFn and MCLFn, consisting of (n - 1) steps of the dispersive scheme (LW or MC) and I step of the dissipative LF scheme. We introduce a new concept, baptised as Curbing of Dispersion by Dissipation for Efficient Shock-capturing, CDDES in which a cfl number is computed whereby dissipation curbs dispersion. This cfl number is termed as optimal in this work. We conduct a comparative study based on numerical experiments in 2-D namely: contact-discontinuity problem [Ould Kaber SM. A legendre pseudospectral viscosity method. J Comput Phys 1996;128:165-80], rotating hill problem [Ould Kaber SM, 1996] and the deformative flow of Smolarkiewicz [Dabdub Donald, Seinfeld John H. Numerical advective schemes used in air quality models-sequential and parallel implementation. Atmos Environ 1994;28(20):3369-85, Ghods A, Sobouti F, Arkani-Hamed J. Ali improved second order method for solution of pure advection problems. Int J Numer Meth Fluids 2000;32:959-77, Nguyen K, Dabdub D. Two-level time-marching scheme using splines for solving the advection equation. Atmos Environ 2001;35:1627-37] to show that the MacCormack/Lax-Friedrichs (MCLF) scheme is more efficient than LWLF scheme to capture shocks in regions of discontinuity. We also show that better results are obtained at optimal cfl numbers for some variants of LWLFn and MCLFn schemes, with n = 2, 3, 4 and 5. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.