Abstract: | We develop an upwind finite volume (UFV) scheme for unsteady‐state advection‐diffusion partial differential equations (PDEs) in multiple space dimensions. We apply an alternating direction implicit (ADI) splitting technique to accelerate the solution process of the numerical scheme. We investigate and analyze the reason why the conventional ADI splitting does not satisfy maximum principle in the context of advection‐diffusion PDEs. Based on the analysis, we propose a new ADI splitting of the upwind finite volume scheme, the alternating‐direction implicit, upwind finite volume (ADFV) scheme. We prove that both UFV and ADFV schemes satisfy maximum principle and are unconditionally stable. We also derive their error estimates. Numerical results are presented to observe the performance of these schemes. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 19: 211–226, 2003 |