A survey of numerical schemes for transportation equation

Abstract

The convection-diffusion equation is a fundamental equation that exists widely. The convection-diffusion equation consists of two processes: diffusion and convection. The convection-diffusion equation can also be called drift-diffusion equaintion. The convection – diffusion equation mainly characterizes natural phenomenon in which physical particles, energy are transferred in a system. The well-known linear transport equation is also one kind of convection-diffusion equation. The transport equation can describe the transport of a scalar field such as material feature, chemical reaction or temperature in an incompressible flow. In this paper, we discuss the famous numerical scheme, Lax-Friedrichs method, for the linear transport equation. The important ingredient of the design of the Lax-Friedrichs Method, namely the choice of the numerical fluxes will be discussed in detail. We give a detailed proof of the L1 stability of the Lax-Friedrichs scheme for the linear transport equation. We also address issues related to the implementation of this numerical scheme.