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Title: Differencing the diffusion equation on unstructured meshes in 2-D

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/46726· OSTI ID:46726

During the last few years, there has been an increased effort to devise robust transport differencings for unstructured meshes, specifically arbitrarily connected grids of polygons. Adams has investigated unstructured mesh discretization techniques for the even- and odd-parity forms of the transport equation, and for the more traditional first-order form. Conversely, development of unstructured mesh diffusion methods has been lacking. While Morel, Kershaw, Shestakov and others have done a great deal of work on diffusion schemes for logically-rectangular grids, to the author`s knowledge there has been no work on discretizations of the diffusion equation on unstructured meshes of polygons. In this paper, the authors introduce a point-centered diffusion differencing for two-dimensional unstructured meshes. They have designed the method to have the following attractive properties: (1) the scheme is equivalent to the standard five-point point-centered scheme on an orthogonal mesh; (2) the method preserves the homogeneous linear solution; (3) the method gives second-order accuracy; (4) they have strict conservation within the control volume surrounding each point; and (5) the numerical solution converges to the exact result as the mesh is refined, regardless of the smoothness of the mesh. A potential disadvantage of the method is that the diffusion matrix is asymmetric, in general.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
W-7405-ENG-48
OSTI ID:
46726
Report Number(s):
UCRL-ID-119045; ON: DE95010410; TRN: 95:011067
Resource Relation:
Other Information: PBD: 24 Oct 1994
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English