An adaptive space-time shock capturing method with high order wavelet bases for the system of shallow water equations

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to propose an adaptive method for the numerical solution of the shallow water equations (SWEs). The authors provide an arbitrary high-order method using high-order spline wavelets. Furthermore, they use a non-linear shock capturing (SC) diffusion which removes the necessity of post-processing.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors use a space-time weak formulation of SWEs which exploits continuous Galerkin (cG) in space and discontinuous Galerkin (dG) in time allowing time stepping, also known as cGdG. Such formulations along with SC term have recently been proved to ensure the stability of fully discrete schemes without scarifying the accuracy. However, the resulting scheme is expensive in terms of number of degrees of freedom (DoFs). By using natural adaptivity of wavelet expansions, the authors devise an adaptive algorithm to reduce the number of DoFs.

Findings

The proposed algorithm uses DoFs in a dynamic way to capture the shocks in all time steps while keeping the representation of approximate solution sparse. The performance of the proposed scheme is shown through some numerical examples.

Originality/value

An incorporation of wavelets for adaptivity in space-time weak formulations applied for SWEs is proposed.

Citation

Minbashian, H., Adibi, H. and Dehghan, M. (2018), "An adaptive space-time shock capturing method with high order wavelet bases for the system of shallow water equations", International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Vol. 28 No. 12, pp. 2842-2861. https://doi.org/10.1108/HFF-08-2017-0320