Communications on Applied Mathematics and Computation ›› 2021, Vol. 3 ›› Issue (4): 671-700.doi: 10.1007/s42967-020-00098-y

• ORIGINAL PAPER • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Enforcing Strong Stability of Explicit Runge-Kutta Methods with Superviscosity

Zheng Sun1, Chi-Wang Shu2   

  1. 1 Department of Mathematics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA;
    2 Division of Applied Mathematics, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA
  • Received:2019-12-26 Revised:2020-07-17 Online:2021-11-20 Published:2021-11-25
  • Contact: Zheng Sun, Chi-Wang Shu E-mail:sun.2516@osu.edu;chi-wang_shu@brown.edu
  • Supported by:
    Research supported by NSF Grants DMS-1719410 and DMS-2010107, and by AFOSR Grant FA9550-20-1-0055.

Abstract: A time discretization method is called strongly stable (or monotone), if the norm of its numerical solution is nonincreasing. Although this property is desirable in various of contexts, many explicit Runge-Kutta (RK) methods may fail to preserve it. In this paper, we enforce strong stability by modifying the method with superviscosity, which is a numerical technique commonly used in spectral methods. Our main focus is on strong stability under the inner-product norm for linear problems with possibly non-normal operators. We propose two approaches for stabilization: the modifed method and the fltering method. The modifed method is achieved by modifying the semi-negative operator with a high order superviscosity term; the fltering method is to post-process the solution by solving a difusive or dispersive problem with small superviscosity. For linear problems, most explicit RK methods can be stabilized with either approach without accuracy degeneration. Furthermore, we prove a sharp bound (up to an equal sign) on difusive superviscosity for ensuring strong stability. For nonlinear problems, a fltering method is investigated. Numerical examples with linear non-normal ordinary diferential equation systems and for discontinuous Galerkin approximations of conservation laws are performed to validate our analysis and to test the performance.

Key words: Runge-Kutta (RK) methods, Strong stability, Superviscosity, Hyperbolic conservation laws, Discontinuous Galerkin methods

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