| Abstract: | We investigate through analysis and computational experiment explicit second and third‐order strong‐stability preserving (SSP) Runge–Kutta time discretization methods in order to gain perspective on the practical necessity of the SSP property. We consider general theoretical SSP limits for these schemes and present a new optimal third‐order low‐storage SSP method that is SSP at a CFL number of 0.838. We compare results of practical preservation of the TVD property using SSP and non‐SSP time integrators to integrate a class of semi‐discrete Godunov‐type spatial discretizations. Our examples involve numerical solutions to Burgers' equation and the Euler equations. We observe that ‘well‐designed’ non‐SSP and non‐optimal SSP schemes with SSP coefficients less than one provide comparable stability when used with time steps below the standard CFL limit. Results using a third‐order non‐TVD CWENO scheme are also presented. We verify that the documented SSP methods with the number of stages greater than the order provide a useful enhanced stability region. We show by analysis and by numerical experiment that the non‐oscillatory third‐order reconstructions used in (Liu and Tadmor Numer. Math. 1998; 79 :397–425, Kurganov and Petrova Numer. Math. 2001; 88 :683–729) are in general only second‐ and first‐order accurate, respectively. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
