It is well known that numerical derivative contains two types of errors. One is truncation error and the other is rounding error. By evaluating variables with rounding error, together with step size and the unknown coefficient of the truncation error, the total error can be determined. We also know that the step size affects the truncation error very much, especially when the step size is large. On the other hand, rounding error will dominate numerical error when the step size is too small. Thus, to choose a suitable step size is an important task in computing the numerical differentiation. If we want to reach an accuracy result of the numerical difference, we had better estimate the best step size. We can use Taylor Expression to analyze the order of truncation error, which is usually expressed by the big O notation, that is, E(h) = Chk. Since the leading coefficient C contains the factor f(k)(ζ) for high order k and unknown ζ, the truncation error is often estimated by a roughly upper bound. If we try to estimate the high order difference f(k)(ζ), this term usually contains larger error. Hence, the uncertainty of ζ and the rounding errors hinder a possible accurate numerical derivative.

We will introduce the statistical process into the traditional numerical difference. The new method estimates truncation error and rounding error at the same time for a given step size. When we estimate these two types of error successfully, we can reach much better modified results. We also propose a genetic approach to reach a confident numerical derivative.

There have been great efforts on the development of higher-order numerical schemes for compressible Euler equations in recent decades. The traditional test cases proposed thirty years ago mostly target on the strong shock interactions, which may not be adequate enough for evaluating the performance of current higher-order schemes. In order to set up a higher standard for the development of new algorithms, in this paper we present a few benchmark cases with severe and complicated wave structures and interactions, which can be used to clearly distinguish different kinds of higher-order schemes. All tests are selected so that the numerical settings are very simple and any higher order scheme can be straightforwardly applied to these cases. The examples include highly oscillatory solutions and the large density ratio problem in one dimensional case. In two dimensions, the cases include hurricane-like solutions; interactions of planar contact discontinuities with asymptotic large Mach number (the composite of entropy wave and vortex sheets); interaction of planar rarefaction waves with transition from continuous flows to the presence of shocks; and other types of interactions of two-dimensional planar waves. To get good performance on all these cases may push algorithm developer to seek for new methodology in the design of higher-order schemes, and improve the robustness and accuracy of higher-order schemes to a new level of standard. In order to give reference solutions, the fourth-order gas-kinetic scheme (GKS) will be used to all these benchmark cases, even though the GKS solutions may not be very accurate in some cases. The main purpose of this paper is to recommend other CFD researchers to try these cases as well, and promote further development of higher-order schemes.

In this paper, the magnetic field effects on natural convection of power-law nanofluids in rectangular enclosures are investigated numerically with the lattice Boltzmann method. The fluid in the cavity is a water-based nanofluid containing Cu nanoparticles and the investigations are carried out for different governing parameters including Hartmann number (0.0≤Ha≤20.0), Rayleigh number (104≤Ra≤106), power-law index (0.5≤n≤1.0), nanopartical volume fraction (0.0≤ϕ≤0.1) and aspect ratio (0.125≤AR≤8.0). The results reveal that the flow oscillations can be suppressed effectively by imposing an external magnetic field and the augmentation of Hartmann number and power-law index generally decreases the heat transfer rate. Additionally, it is observed that the average Nusselt number is increased with the increase of Rayleigh number and nanoparticle volume fraction. Moreover, the present results also indicate that there is a critical value for aspect ratio at which the impact on heat transfer is the most pronounced.

Numerical simulations of two-dimensional (2D) turbulent thermal convection for inhomogeneous boundary condition are investigated using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). This study mainly appraises the temporal evolution and the scaling behavior of global quantities and of small-scale turbulence properties. The research results show that the flow is dominated by large-scale structures in the turbulence regime. Mushroom plumes emerge at both ends of each heat source, and smaller plumes increasingly rise. It is found that the gradient of root mean-square (rms) vertical velocities and the gradient of the rms temperature in the bottom boundary layer decreases with time evolution. It is further observed that the temporal evolution of the Kolmogorov scale, the kinetic-energy dissipation rates and thermal dissipation rates agree well with the theoretical predictions. It is also observed that there is a range of linear scaling in the 2nd-order structure functions of the velocity and temperature fluctuations and mixed velocity-temperature structure function.

Direct numerical simulations of the transition process from steady laminar to chaotic flow are considered in this study with the relatively new incompressible lattice Boltzmann equation. Numerically, a multiple relaxation time fully incompressible lattice Boltzmann equation is implemented in a 2D driven cavity. Spatial discretization is 2nd-order accurate, and the Kolmogorov length scale estimation based on Reynolds number (Re) dictates grid resolution. Initial simulations show the method to be accurate for steady laminar flows, while higher Re simulations reveal periodic flow behavior consistent with an initial Hopf bifurcation at Re 7,988. Non-repeating flow behavior is observed in the phase space trajectories above Re 13,063, and is evidence of the transition to a chaotic flow regime. Finally, flows at Reynolds numbers above the chaotic transition point are simulated and found with statistical properties in good agreement with literature.

In this paper, based on the multi-symplectic formulations of the generalized fifth-order KdV equation and the averaged vector field method, two new energy-preserving methods are proposed, including a new local energy-preserving algorithm which is independent of the boundary conditions and a new global energy-preserving method. We prove that the proposed methods preserve the energy conservation laws exactly. Numerical experiments are carried out, which demonstrate that the numerical methods proposed in the paper preserve energy well.

A new sharp interface method with the combination of Ghost Fluid Method (GFM) and Cut Cell scheme is developed to study compressible multi-phase flows with clear interfaces. Straight-line cutting is applied on the cells passed by the interface. A new real-ghost mixing method is presented and applied around the cut cells to deal with very small cut cells. A cut face reconstruction method similar to volume of fluid is applied to deal with topological change problems. A high order Level Set (LS) method is applied to evolve the free interface, with the Level Set velocities from exact Riemann solver on the cut faces. Various 1D and 2D numerical examples are tested to show the robustness and ability of the present method in wide flow variable domains. This method benefits from cut cell on the sharp interface description, shows good conservation performance, and does not have the topological change difficulty of the full cut cell method presented in Chang, Deng & Theofanous, J. Comput. Phys., 242 (2013), pp. 946–990.

This paper studies the magneto-heat coupling model which describes iron loss of conductors and energy exchange between magnetic field and Ohmic heat. The temperature influences Maxwell's equations through the variation of electric conductivity, while electric eddy current density provides the heat equation with Ohmic heat source. It is in this way that Maxwell's equations and the heat equation are coupled together. The system also incorporates the heat exchange between conductors and cooling oil which is poured into and out of the transformer. We propose a weak formulation for the coupling model and establish the well-posedness of the problem. The model is more realistic than the traditional eddy current model in numerical simulations for large power transformers. The theoretical analysis of this paper paves a way for us to design efficient numerical computation of the transformer in the future.

This paper is concerned with the invisibility cloaking in acoustic wave scattering from a new perspective. We are especially interested in achieving the invisibility cloaking by completely regular and isotropic mediums. It is shown that an interior transmission eigenvalue problem arises in our study, which is the one considered theoretically in Cakoni et al. (Transmission eigenvalues for inhomogeneous media containing obstacles, Inverse Problems and Imaging, 6 (2012), 373–398). Based on such an observation, we propose a cloaking scheme that takes a three-layer structure including a cloaked region, a lossy layer and a cloaking shell. The target medium in the cloaked region can be arbitrary but regular, whereas the mediums in the lossy layer and the cloaking shell are both regular and isotropic. We establish that if a certain non-transparency condition is satisfied, then there exists an infinite set of incident waves such that the cloaking device is nearly invisible under the corresponding wave interrogation. The set of waves is generated from the Herglotz approximation of the associated interior transmission eigenfunctions. We provide both theoretical and numerical justifications.

We study the error analysis of the weak Galerkin finite element method in [24, 38] (WG-FEM) for the Helmholtz problem with large wave number in two and three dimensions. Using a modified duality argument proposed by Zhu and Wu, we obtain the pre-asymptotic error estimates of the WG-FEM. In particular, the error estimates with explicit dependence on the wave number k are derived. This shows that the pollution error in the broken H1-norm is bounded by under mesh condition k7/2h2≤C0 or (kh)2+k(kh)p+1≤C0, which coincides with the phase error of the finite element method obtained by existent dispersion analyses. Here h is the mesh size, p is the order of the approximation space and C0 is a constant independent of k and h. Furthermore, numerical tests are provided to verify the theoretical findings and to illustrate the great capability of the WG-FEM in reducing the pollution effect.

We propose a reliable direct imaging method based on the reverse time migration for finding extended obstacles with phaseless total field data. We prove that the imaging resolution of the method is essentially the same as the imaging results using the scattering data with full phase information when the measurement is far away from the obstacle. The imaginary part of the cross-correlation imaging functional always peaks on the boundary of the obstacle. Numerical experiments are included to illustrate the powerful imaging quality

Based on the shift-splitting technique and the idea of Hermitian and skew-Hermitian splitting, a fast shift-splitting iteration method is proposed for solving nonsingular and singular nonsymmetric saddle point problems in this paper. Convergence and semi-convergence of the proposed iteration method for nonsingular and singular cases are carefully studied, respectively. Numerical experiments are implemented to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, we introduce the Hamiltonian boundary value method (HBVM) to solve nonlinear Hamiltonian PDEs. We use the idea of Fourier pseudospectral method in spatial direction, which leads to the finite-dimensional Hamiltonian system. The HBVM, which can preserve the Hamiltonian effectively, is applied in time direction. Then the nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation and the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation are taken as examples to show the validity of the proposed method. Numerical results confirm that the proposed method can simulate the propagation and collision of different solitons well. Meanwhile the corresponding errors in Hamiltonian and other intrinsic invariants are presented to show the good preservation property of the proposed method during long-time numerical calculation.

In this work we utilize the boundary integral equation and the Dual Reciprocity Boundary Element Method (DRBEM) for the solution of the steady state convection-diffusion-reaction equations with variable convective coefficients in two-dimension. The DRBEM is a numerical method to transform the domain integrals into the boundary only integrals by using the fundamental solution of Helmholtz equation. Some examples are calculated to confirm the accuracy of the approach. The results obtained by the analytic solutions are in good agreement with ones provided by the DRBEM technique.

In present work, we investigate numerical simulation of steady natural convection flow in the presence of weak magnetic Prandtl number and strong magnetic field by involving algebraic decay in mainstream velocity. Before passing to the numerical simulation, we formulate the set of boundary layer equations with the inclusion of the effects of algebraic decay velocity, aligned magnetic field and buoyant body force in the momentum equation. Later, finite difference method with primitive variable formulation is employed in the physical domain to compute the numerical solutions of the flow field. Graphical results for the velocity, temperature and transverse component of magnetic field as well as surface friction, rate of heat transfer and current density are presented and discussed. It is pertinent to mention that the simulation is performed for different values of algebraic decay parameter α, Prandtl number Pr, magnetic Prandtl number Pm and magnetic force parameter S.

In this paper, we focus on graphical processing unit (GPU) and discuss how its architecture affects the choice of algorithm and implementation of fully-implicit petroleum reservoir simulation. In order to obtain satisfactory performance on new many-core architectures such as GPUs, the simulator developers must know a great deal on the specific hardware and spend a lot of time on fine tuning the code. Porting a large petroleum reservoir simulator to emerging hardware architectures is expensive and risky. We analyze major components of an in-house reservoir simulator and investigate how to port them to GPUs in a cost-effective way. Preliminary numerical experiments show that our GPU-based simulator is robust and effective. More importantly, these numerical results clearly identify the main bottlenecks to obtain ideal speedup on GPUs and possibly other many-core architectures.

This paper presents a lattice Boltzmann (LB) method based study aimed at numerical simulation of aeroacoustic phenomenon in flows around a symmetric obstacle. To simulate the compressible flow accurately, a potential energy double-distribution-function (DDF) lattice Boltzmann method is used over the entire computational domain from the near to far fields. The buffer zone and absorbing boundary condition is employed to eliminate the non-physical reflecting. Through the direct numerical simulation, the flow around a circular cylinder at Re=150, M=0.2 and the flow around a NACA0012 airfoil at Re=10000, M=0.8, α=0° are investigated. The generation and propagation of the sound produced by the vortex shedding are reappeared clearly. The obtained results increase our understanding of the characteristic features of the aeroacoustic sound.

A problem of two equal, semi-permeable, collinear cracks, situated normal to the edges of an infinitely long piezoelectric strip is considered. Piezoelectric strip being prescribed out-of-plane shear stress and in-plane electric-displacement. The Fourier series and integral equation methods are adopted to obtain analytical solution of the problem. Closed-form analytic expressions are derived for various fracture parameters viz. crack-sliding displacement, crack opening potential drop, field intensity factors and energy release rate. An numerical case study is considered for poled PZT–5H, BaTiO3 and PZT–6B piezoelectric ceramics to study the effect of applied electro-mechanical loadings, crack-face boundary conditions as well as inter-crack distance on fracture parameters. The obtained results are presented graphically, discussed and concluded.

Vortex rings have been a subject of interest in vortex dynamics due to a plethora of physical phenomena revealed by their motions and interactions within a boundary. The present paper is devoted to physics of a head-on collision of two vortex rings in three dimensional space, simulated with a second order finite volume scheme and compressible. The scheme combines non-iterative approximate Riemann-solver and piecewise-parabolic reconstruction used in inviscid flux evaluation procedure. The computational results of vortex ring collisions capture several distinctive phenomena. In the early stages of the simulation, the rings propagate under their own self-induced motion. As the rings approach each other, their radii increase, followed by stretching and merging during the collision. Later, the two rings have merged into a single doughnut-shaped structure. This structure continues to extend in the radial direction, leaving a web of particles around the centers. At a later time, the formation of ringlets propagate radially away from the center of collision, and then the effects of instability involved leads to a reconnection in which small-scale ringlets are generated. In addition, it is shown that the scheme captures several experimentally observed features of the ring collisions, including a turbulent breakdown into small-scale structures and the generation of small-scale radially propagating vortex rings, due to the modification of the vorticity distribution, as a result of the entrainment of background vorticity and helicity by the vortex core, and their subsequent interaction.

The first-order cross correlation and corresponding applications in the passive imaging are deeply studied by Garnier and Papanicolaou in their pioneer works. In this paper, the results of the first-order cross correlation are generalized to the second-order cross correlation. The second-order cross correlation is proven to be a statistically stable quantity, with respective to the random ambient noise sources. Specially, with proper time scales, the stochastic fluctuation for the second-order cross correlation converges much faster than the first-order one. Indeed, the convergent rate is of order , with 0 < α < 1. Besides, by using the stationary phase method in both homogeneous and scattering medium, similar behaviors of the singular components for the second-order cross correlation are obtained. Finally, two imaging methods are proposed to search for a target point reflector: One method is based on the imaging function, and has a better signal-to-noise rate; Another method is based on the geometric property, and can improve the bad range resolution of the imaging results.