Timestep Control for Weakly Instationary Flows

We report on recent work on adaptive timestep control for weakly instationary gas flows [16, 18, 17] carried out within SFB 401, TPA3. The method which we implement and extend is a space-time splitting of adjoint error representations for target functionals due to Süli [19] and Hartmann [10]. In this paper, we first review the method for scalar, 1D, conservation laws. We design a test problem for weakly instationary solutions and show numerical experiments which clearly show the possible benefits of the method. Then we extend the approach to the 2D Euler equations of gas dynamics. New ingredients are (i) a conservative formulation of the adjoint problem which makes its solution robust and efficient, (ii) the derivation of boundary conditions for this new formulation of the adjoint problem and (iii) the coupling of the adaptive time-stepping with the multiscale spatial adaptation due to Müller [12, 3], also developed within SFB 401. The combined space-time adaptive method provides an efficient choice of timesteps for implicit computations of weakly instationary flows. The timestep will be very large in regions of stationary flow, and becomes small when a perturbation enters the flow field. The efficiency of the Euler solver is investigated by means of an unsteady inviscid 2D flow over a bump.