RELATIONSHIPS AMONG CHARACTERISTIC FINITE ELEMENT METHODS FOR ADVECTION-DIFFUSION PROBLEMS

Advection-dominated transport problems possess difficulties in the design of numerical methods for solving them. Because of the hyperbolic nature of advective transport, many characteristic numerical methods have been developed such as the classical characteristic method, the Eulerian-Lagrangian method, the transport diffusion method, the modified method of characteristics, the operator splitting method, the Eulerian-Lagrangian localized adjoint method, the characteristic mixed method, and the Eulerian-Lagrangian mixed discontinuous method. In this paper relationships among these characteristic methods are examined. In particular, we show that these sometimes diverse methods can be given a unified formulation. This paper focuses on characteristic finite element methods. Similar examination can be presented for characteristic finite difference methods.