On Optimal Cell Average Decomposition for High-Order Bound-Preserving Schemes of Hyperbolic Conservation Laws

Abstract: This paper presents the first systematic study on the fundamental problem of seeking optimal cell average decomposition (OCAD), which arises from constructing efficient high-order bound-preserving (BP) numerical methods within Zhang--Shu framework. Since proposed in 2010, Zhang--Shu framework has attracted extensive attention and been applied to developing many high-order BP discontinuous Galerkin and finite volume schemes for various hyperbolic equations. An essential ingredient in the framework is the decomposition of the cell averages of the numerical solution into a convex combination of the solution values at certain quadrature points. The classic CAD originally proposed by Zhang and Shu has been widely used in the past decade. However, the feasible CADs are not unique, and different CAD would affect the theoretical BP CFL condition and thus the computational costs. Zhang and Shu only checked, for the 1D $\mathbb P^2$ and $\mathbb P^3$ spaces, that their classic CAD based on the Gauss--Lobatto quadrature is optimal in the sense of achieving the mildest BP CFL conditions. In this paper, we establish the general theory for studying the OCAD problem on Cartesian meshes in 1D and 2D. We rigorously prove that the classic CAD is optimal for general 1D $\mathbb P^k$ spaces and general 2D $\mathbb Q^k$ spaces of arbitrary $k$. For the widely used 2D $\mathbb P^k$ spaces, the classic CAD is not optimal, and we establish the general approach to find out the genuine OCAD and propose a more practical quasi-optimal CAD, both of which provide much milder BP CFL conditions than the classic CAD. As a result, our OCAD and quasi-optimal CAD notably improve the efficiency of high-order BP schemes for a large class of hyperbolic or convection-dominated equations, at little cost of only a slight and local modification to the implementation code.