Date Available

12-14-2011

Year of Publication

2006

Document Type

Dissertation

College

Engineering

Department

Civil Engineering

First Advisor

Scott A. Yost

Abstract

Many applications in engineering practice can be described by thehyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs). Numerical modeling of this typeof equations often involves large gradients or shocks, which makes it achallenging task for conventional numerical methods to accurately simulate suchsystems. Thus developing accurate and efficient shock capturing numericalschemes becomes important for the study of hyperbolic equations.In this dissertation, a detailed study of the numerical methods for linearand nonlinear unsteady hyperbolic equations was carried out. A new finitedifference shock capturing scheme of finite volume style was developed. Thisscheme is based on the high order Pad?? type compact central finite differencemethod with the weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) reconstruction toeliminate non-physical oscillations near the discontinuities while maintain stablesolution in the smooth areas. The unconditionally stable semi-implicit Crank-Nicolson (CN) scheme is used for time integration.The theoretical development was conducted based on one-dimensionalhomogeneous scalar equation and system equations. Discussions were alsoextended to include source terms and to deal with problems of higher dimension.For the treatment of source terms, Strang splitting was used. For multidimensionalequations, the ?? -form Douglas-Gunn alternating direction implicit(ADI) method was employed. To compare the performance of the scheme withENO type interpolation, the current numerical framework was also applied usingENO reconstruction.The numerical schemes were tested on 1-D and 2-D benchmark problems,as well as published experimental results. The simulated results show thecapability of the proposed scheme to resolve discontinuities while maintainingaccuracy in smooth regions. Comparisons with the experimental results validatethe method for dam break problems. It is concluded that the proposed scheme isa useful tool for solving hyperbolic equations in general, and from engineeringapplication perspective it provides a new way of modeling open channel flows.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.