ON TAYLOR WEAK STATEMENT FINITE-ELEMENT METHODS FOR COMPUTATIONAL FLUID-DYNAMICS

A Taylor series augmentation of a weak statement (a 'Taylor weak statement' or 'Taylor-Galerkin' method) is used to systematically reduce the dispersion error in a finite element approximation of the one-dimensional transient advection equation. A frequency analysis is applied to determine the phase velocity of semi-implicit linear, quadratic and cubic basis one-dimensional finite element methods and of several comparative finite difference/finite volume algorithms. The finite element methods analysed include both Galerkin and Taylor weak statements. The frequency analysis is used to obtain an improved linear basis Taylor weak statement finite element algorithm. Solutions are reported for verification problems in one and two dimensions and are compared with finite volume solutions. The improved finite element algorithms have sufficient phase accuracy to achieve highly accurate linear transient solutions with little or no artificial diffusion.