High-order conservative reconstruction schemes for finite volume methods in cylindrical and spherical coordinates

Abstract High-order reconstruction schemes for the solution of hyperbolic conservation laws in orthogonal curvilinear coordinates are revised in the finite volume approach. The formulation employs a piecewise polynomial approximation to the zone-average values to reconstruct left and right interface states from within a computational zone to arbitrary order of accuracy by inverting a Vandermonde-like linear system of equations with spatially varying coefficients. The approach is general and can be used on uniform and non-uniform meshes although explicit expressions are derived for polynomials from second to fifth degree in cylindrical and spherical geometries with uniform grid spacing. It is shown that, in regions of large curvature, the resulting expressions differ considerably from their Cartesian counterparts and that the lack of such corrections can severely degrade the accuracy of the solution close to the coordinate origin. Limiting techniques and monotonicity constraints are revised for conventional reconstruction schemes, namely, the piecewise linear method (PLM), third-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme and the piecewise parabolic method (PPM). The performance of the improved reconstruction schemes is investigated in a number of selected numerical benchmarks involving the solution of both scalar and systems of nonlinear equations (such as the equations of gas dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics) in cylindrical and spherical geometries in one and two dimensions. Results confirm that the proposed approach yields considerably smaller errors, higher convergence rates and it avoid spurious numerical effects at a symmetry axis.