A fully convergent fixed-point fast sweeping method with the WENO-JS local solver for steady state of hyperbolic conservation laws

Abstract

The fixed-point fast sweeping methods with weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) local solvers are a class of efficient and high-order accuracy numerical methods for solving steady-state solutions of hyperbolic conservation laws. However, with the classical WENO-JS local solver, the iteration residue of high-order fixed-point fast sweeping scheme often has difficulty to settle down to round-off errors. To achieve the full convergence in a fast sweeping method, the fixed-point fast sweeping methods with non-traditional WENO local solvers based on unequal-sized substencils were designed. However, the WENO schemes based on unequal-sized stencils are more complex and in general more expensive in computational costs than the classical WENO-JS schemes. In this paper, we go back to the classical WENO-JS local solver and develop a new fully convergent fifth-order fixed-point fast sweeping method for solving steady-state problems of hyperbolic conservation laws. Based on recent studies on the nonlinear weighting process around discontinuities of solution, we apply the technique of frozen weights for avoiding unnecessary adjustment of nonlinear weights in the WENO-JS local solver, which freezes the nonlinear weights once the residual sequence in the fast sweeping iterations has stabilized. Different from the existing work on frozen weights, we design a simple and robust approach to judge stabilization of iteration residues and determine the iteration step when the nonlinear weights are frozen in the fast sweeping method. Extensive numerical experiments on a wide range of challenging two-dimensional steady-state problems demonstrate that, unlike the previous fast sweeping method with the fifth-order WENO-JS local solver, the proposed new scheme consistently drives the iteration residues to round-off errors and achieves the full convergence.