scholarly journals A global finite-element shallow-water model supporting continuous and discontinuous elements

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 5141-5182 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. A. Ullrich

Abstract. This paper presents a novel nodal finite element method for either continuous and discontinuous elements, as applied to the 2-D shallow-water equations on the cubed-sphere. The cornerstone of this method is the construction of a robust derivative operator which can be applied to compute discrete derivatives even over a discontinuous function space. A key advantage of the robust derivative is that it can be applied to partial differential equations in either conservative or non-conservative form. However, it is also shown that discontinuous penalization is required to recover the correct order of accuracy for discontinuous elements. Two versions with discontinuous elements are examined, using either the g1 and g2 flux correction function for distribution of boundary fluxes and penalty across nodal points. Scalar and vector hyperviscosity operators valid for both continuous and discontinuous elements are also derived for stabilization and removal of grid-scale noise. This method is validated using three standard shallow-water test cases, including geostrophically balanced flow, a mountain-induced Rossby wave train and a barotropic instability. The results show that although the discontinuous basis requires a smaller time step size than that required for continuous elements, the method exhibits better stability and accuracy properties in the absence of hyperviscosity.

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 3017-3035 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. A. Ullrich

Abstract. This paper presents a novel nodal finite-element method for either continuous and discontinuous elements, as applied to the 2-D shallow-water equations on the cubed sphere. The cornerstone of this method is the construction of a robust derivative operator that can be applied to compute discrete derivatives even over a discontinuous function space. A key advantage of the robust derivative is that it can be applied to partial differential equations in either a conservative or a non-conservative form. However, it is also shown that discontinuous penalization is required to recover the correct order of accuracy for discontinuous elements. Two versions with discontinuous elements are examined, using either the g1 and g2 flux correction function for distribution of boundary fluxes and penalty across nodal points. Scalar and vector hyperviscosity (HV) operators valid for both continuous and discontinuous elements are also derived for stabilization and removal of grid-scale noise. This method is validated using four standard shallow-water test cases, including geostrophically balanced flow, a mountain-induced Rossby wave train, the Rossby–Haurwitz wave and a barotropic instability. The results show that although the discontinuous basis requires a smaller time step size than that required for continuous elements, the method exhibits better stability and accuracy properties in the absence of hyperviscosity.


2011 ◽  
Vol 139 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Archibald ◽  
Katherine J. Evans ◽  
John Drake ◽  
James B. White

Abstract In this paper a new approach is presented to increase the time-step size for an explicit discontinuous Galerkin numerical method. The attributes of this approach are demonstrated on standard tests for the shallow-water equations on the sphere. The addition of multiwavelets to the discontinuous Galerkin method, which has the benefit of being scalable, flexible, and conservative, provides a hierarchical scale structure that can be exploited to improve computational efficiency in both the spatial and temporal dimensions. This paper explains how combining a multiwavelet discontinuous Galerkin method with exact-linear-part time evolution schemes, which can remain stable for implicit-sized time steps, can help increase the time-step size for shallow-water equations on the sphere.


1973 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. E. Beckett ◽  
S.-C. Chu

By use of an implicit iteration technique, the finite-element method applied to the heat-conduction problems of solids is no longer restricted to the linear heat-flux boundary conditions, but is extended to include nonlinear radiation–convection boundary conditions. The variation of surface temperatures within each time increment is taken into account; hence a rather large time-step size can be assigned to obtain transient heat-conduction solutions without introducing instability in the surface temperature of a body.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 168781401774807 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yonghu Wang ◽  
Dongwei Shu ◽  
Yusaku Fujii ◽  
Akihiro Takita ◽  
Tsuneaki Ishima ◽  
...  

In order to precisely measure water impact loads of a spherical structure vertically dropping onto a calm water surface, a new validity check of the analysis using the levitation mass method experiment is proposed. The main feature of levitation mass method experiment is to obtain a better estimation of early water impact loads through the application of Doppler effect. Experimental results of different heights are verified based on the Assessment Index and are in comparison with the classical experimental data for validation purpose. It shows that the levitation mass method measurement is useful and effective to obtain the water impact loads for the crashworthiness analysis. Besides, early water impact hydrodynamic behaviors are simulated based on the nonlinear explicit finite element method, together with application of a multi-material arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian solver. A penalty coupling algorithm is utilized to realize fluid–structure interaction between the spherical body and fluids. Convergence studies are performed to construct the proper finite element model by the comparison with experimental results, where mesh sensitivity, contact stiffness, and time-step size parametric studies are thoroughly investigated. The comparisons between experimental and numerical results show good consistency by the prediction of the water impact coefficients on the structure.


2018 ◽  
Vol 146 (7) ◽  
pp. 2047-2064 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyun-Gyu Kang ◽  
Hyeong-Bin Cheong

Abstract A high-order filter for a cubed-sphere spectral element model was implemented in a three-dimensional spectral element dry hydrostatic dynamical core. The dynamical core incorporated hybrid sigma–pressure vertical coordinates and a third-order Runge–Kutta time-differencing method. The global high-order filter and the local-domain high-order filter, requiring numerical operation with a huge sparse global matrix and a locally assembled matrix, respectively, were applied to the prognostic variables, except for surface pressure, at every time step. Performance of the high-order filter was evaluated using the baroclinic instability test and quiescent atmosphere with underlying topography test presented by the Dynamical Core Model Intercomparison Project. It was revealed that both the global and local-domain high-order filters could better control the numerical noise in the noisy circumstances than the explicit diffusion, which is widely used for the spectral element dynamical core. Furthermore, by adopting the high-order filter, the effective resolution of the dynamical core could be increased, without weakening the stability of the dynamical core. Computational efficiency of the high-order filter was demonstrated in terms of both the time step size and the wall-clock time. Because of the nature of an implicit diffusion, the dynamical core employing this filter can take a larger time step size, compared to that using the explicit diffusion. The local-domain high-order filter was computationally more efficient than the global high-order filter, but less efficient than the explicit diffusion.


Author(s):  
W. Dauksher ◽  
A. F. Emery

The dispersive errors in the finite element solution to the one- and two-dimensional heat equations are examined as a function of element type and size, capacitance matrix formulation, time stepping scheme and time step size.


2001 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 639-651 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muthusamy Karthikeyan ◽  
Thiam-Soon Tan ◽  
Kok-Kwang Phoon

The finite element method provides a popular means of analyzing groundwater flow in an unsaturated soil. In such problems, oscillatory results are often observed in the finite element solution. Such a phenomenon is observed, for example, when a typical finite element program such as Seep/w is used to model water infiltration into unsaturated soils. Numerical oscillations are often found near the wetting front where the hydraulic gradient is the steepest. These oscillations do not always reduce with decreasing or increasing time-step size alone; rather, an appropriate ratio between time-step size and element size is required. As the pore-water pressures predicted from a transient seepage analysis are used as input groundwater conditions for other types of analysis such as slope stability, contaminant transport, and capillary barrier, these oscillations may have important practical ramifications. Since seepage analysis is common in engineering practice, it is important that appropriate criteria are identified to minimize, if not to remove, the oscillations. In this paper, numerical examples are provided to demonstrate that a simple set of criteria, developed in heat diffusion problems with constant properties to control oscillation, is also applicable to one- and two-dimensional unsaturated seepage analyses, for a range of material nonlinearities that are frequently encountered in unsaturated soils.Key words: unsaturated soil, soil-water characteristic curve, seepage analysis, finite element method, numerical oscillation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (6) ◽  
pp. 1893-1914
Author(s):  
Piotr Swierczynski ◽  
Barbara Wohlmuth

The presence of corners in the computational domain, in general, reduces the regularity of solutions of parabolic problems and diminishes the convergence properties of the finite element approximation introducing a so-called “pollution effect”. Standard remedies based on mesh refinement around the singular corner result in very restrictive stability requirements on the time-step size when explicit time integration is applied. In this article, we introduce and analyse the energy-corrected finite element method for parabolic problems, which works on quasi-uniform meshes, and, based on it, create fast explicit time discretisation. We illustrate these results with extensive numerical investigations not only confirming the theoretical results but also showing the flexibility of the method, which can be applied in the presence of multiple singular corners and a three-dimensional setting. We also propose a fast explicit time-stepping scheme based on a piecewise cubic energy-corrected discretisation in space completed with mass-lumping techniques and numerically verify its efficiency.


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