A high order adaptive finite element method for solving nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws

In this note, we apply the h-adaptive streamline diffusion finite element method with a small mesh-dependent artificial viscosity to solve nonlinear hyperbolic partial differential equations, with the objective of achieving high order accuracy and mesh efficiency. We compute the numerical solution to a steady state Burgers equation and the solution to a converging-diverging nozzle problem. The computational results verify that, by suitably choosing the artificial viscosity coefficient and applying the adaptive strategy based on a posterior error estimate by Johnson et al., an order of N-3/2 accuracy can be obtained when continuous piecewise linear elements are used, where N is the number of elements. Copyright 2011 by AMSS, Chinese Academy of Sciences.