A third-order semi-discrete genuinely multidimensional central scheme for hyperbolic conservation laws and related problems

Summary. We construct a new third-order semi-discrete genuinely multidimensional central scheme for systems of conservation laws and related convection-diffusion equations. This construction is based on a multidimensional extension of the idea, introduced in 17] – the use of more precise information about the local speeds of propagation, and integration over nonuniform control volumes, which contain Riemann fans. As in the one-dimensional case, the small numerical dissipation, which is independent of , allows us to pass to a limit as . This results in a particularly simple genuinely multidimensional semi-discrete scheme. The high resolution of the proposed scheme is ensured by the new two-dimensional piecewise quadratic non-oscillatory reconstruction. First, we introduce a less dissipative modification of the reconstruction, proposed in 29]. Then, we generalize it for the computation of the two-dimensional numerical fluxes. Our scheme enjoys the main advantage of the Godunov-type central schemes –simplicity, namely it does not employ Riemann solvers and characteristic decomposition. This makes it a universal method, which can be easily implemented to a wide variety of problems. In this paper, the developed scheme is applied to the Euler equations of gas dynamics, a convection-diffusion equation with strongly degenerate diffusion, the incompressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. These numerical experiments demonstrate the desired accuracy and high resolution of our scheme. Received February 7, 2000 / Published online December 19, 2000