To eliminate the numerical oscillations appearing in the first-order symmetric smoothed particle hydrodynamics (FO-SSPH) method for simulating transient heat conduction problems with discontinuous initial distribution, this paper presents a second-order symmetric smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SO-SSPH) method. Numerical properties of both SO-SSPH and FO-SSPH are analyzed, including truncation error, numerical accuracy, convergence rate, and stability. Experimental results show that for transient heat conduction with initial smooth distribution, both FO-SSPH and SO-SSPH can achieve second order convergence rate, which is consistent with the theoretical analysis. However, for one- and two-dimensional conduction with initial discontinuity, the FO-SSPH method suffers from serious unphysical oscillations, which do not disappear over time, and hence it only achieves a first-order convergence rate; while the present SO-SSPH method can avoid unphysical oscillations and has second-order convergence rate. Therefore, the SO-SSPH method is a feasible tool for solving transient heat conduction problems with both smooth and discontinuous distributions, and it is easy to be extended to high dimensional cases.
Second-Order Convergence of Monotone Schemes for Conservation Laws