An inverse Lax-Wendroff procedure for hyperbolic conservation laws with changing wind direction on the boundary

Abstract In this paper, we reconsider the inverse Lax-Wendroff (ILW) procedure, which is a numerical boundary treatment for solving hyperbolic conservation laws, and propose a new approach to evaluate the values on the ghost points. The ILW procedure was firstly proposed to deal with the “cut cell” problems, when the physical boundary intersects with the Cartesian mesh in an arbitrary fashion. The key idea of the ILW procedure is repeatedly utilizing the partial differential equations (PDEs) and inflow boundary conditions to obtain the normal derivatives of each order on the boundary. A simplified ILW procedure was proposed in [28] and used the ILW procedure for the evaluation of the first order normal derivatives only. The main difference between the simplified ILW procedure and the proposed ILW procedure here is that we define the unknown u and the flux f ( u ) on the ghost points separately. One advantage of this treatment is that it allows the eigenvalues of the Jacobian f ′ ( u ) to be close to zero on the boundary, which may appear in many physical problems. We also propose a new weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) type extrapolation at the outflow boundaries, whose idea comes from the multi-resolution WENO schemes in [32] . The WENO type extrapolation maintains high order accuracy if the solution is smooth near the boundary and it becomes a low order extrapolation automatically if a shock is close to the boundary. This WENO type extrapolation preserves the property of self-similarity, thus it is more preferable in computing the hyperbolic conservation laws. We provide extensive numerical examples to demonstrate that our method is stable, high order accurate and has good performance for various problems with different kinds of boundary conditions including the solid wall boundary condition, when the physical boundary is not aligned with the grids.