High Order Fluctuation Splitting Schemes for Hyperbolic Conservation Laws

This thesis presents the construction, the analysis and the verification of a new form of higher than second order fluctuation splitting discretisation for the solution of steady conservation laws on unstructured meshes. This is an alternative approach to the two existing higher than second order fluctuation splitting schemes, which use submesh reconstruction (developed by Abgrall and Roe) and gradient recovery (developed by Caraemi) to obtain the loacl higher degree polynomials used to evaluate the fluctuation. The new higher than second order approach constructs the polynomial interpolant of the values of the dependent variables at an appropriate number of carefully chosen mesh nodes.

As they stand, none of the higher than second order methods can guarantee the absence of spurious oscillations from the flow without the application of an additional smoothing stage. The implementation of a technique that removes unphysical oscillations (devised by Hubbard) as part of a new higher than second order approach will be outlined. The design steps and theoretical bases are discussed in depth.

The new higher than second order approach is examined and analysed through application to a series of linear and nonlinear scalar problems, using a pseudo-time-stepping technique to reach steady state solution on two-dimensional structured and unstructured meshes. The results demonstrate its effectiveness in approximating the linear and nolinear scalar problems.

This thesis also addresses the development and examination of a multistage high order (in space and time) fluctuation splitting scheme for two-dimensional unsteady scalar advection on triangular unstructured meshes. the method is similar in philosophy to that of multistep high order (in space and time) fluctuation splitting scheme for the approximation of time-dependent hyperbolic conservation laws. The construction and implementation of the high order multistage time-dependent method are discussed in detail and its performance is illustrated using several standard test problems. The multistage high order time-dependent method is evaluated in the context of existing fluctuation splitting approaches to modelling time-dependent problems and some suggestions for their future development are made. Results presented indicate that the multistage high orer method can produce a slightly more accurate solution than the multistep high order method.