An Adaptive Well-Balanced Positivity Preserving Central-Upwind Scheme for the Shallow Water Equations Over Quadtree Grids

Abstract

Shallow water equations are widely used to model water flows in the field of hydrodynamics and civil engineering. They are complex, and except for some simplified cases, no analytical solution exists for them. Therefore, the partial differential equations of the shallow water system have been the subject of various numerical analyses and studies in past decades. In this study, we construct a stable and robust finite volume scheme for the shallow water equations over quadtree grids. Quadtree grids are two-dimensional semi-structured Cartesian grids that have different applications in several fields of engineering, such as computational fluid dynamics. Quadtree grids refine or coarsen where it is required in the computational domain, which gives the advantage of reducing the computational cost in some problems.

Numerical schemes on quadtree grids have different properties. An accurate and robust numerical scheme is able to provide a balance between the flux and source terms, preserve the positivity of the water height and water surface, and is capable of regenerating the grid with respect to different conditions of the problem and computed solution. The proposed scheme uses a piecewise constant approximation and employs a high-order Runge-Kutta method to be able to make the solution high-order in space and time. Hence, in this thesis, we develop an adaptive well-balanced positivity preserving scheme for the shallow water system over quadtree grids utilizing different techniques. We demonstrate the formulations of the proposed scheme over one of the different configurations of quadtree cells. Six numerical benchmark tests confirm the ability of the scheme to accurately solve the problems and to capture small perturbations.

Furthermore, we extend the proposed scheme to the coupled variable density shallow water flows and establish an extended method where we focus on eliminating nonphysical oscillations, as well as well-balanced, positivity preserving, and adaptivity properties of the scheme. Four different numerical benchmark tests show that the proposed extension of the scheme is accurate, stable, and robust.