Conservative high order semi-Lagrangian finite difference WENO methods for advection in incompressible flow

In this paper, we propose a semi-Lagrangian finite difference formulation for approximating conservative form of advection equations with general variable coefficients. Compared with the traditional semi-Lagrangian finite difference schemes [5], [25], which approximate the advective form of the equation via direct characteristics tracing, the scheme proposed in this paper approximates the conservative form of the equation. This essential difference makes the proposed scheme naturally conservative for equations with general variable coefficients. The proposed conservative semi-Lagrangian finite difference framework is coupled with high order essentially non-oscillatory (ENO) or weighted ENO (WENO) reconstructions to achieve high order accuracy in smooth parts of the solution and to capture sharp interfaces without introducing spurious oscillations. The scheme is extended to high dimensional problems by Strang splitting. The performance of the proposed schemes is demonstrated by linear advection, rigid body rotation, swirling deformation, and two dimensional incompressible flow simulation in the vorticity stream-function formulation. As the information is propagating along characteristics, the proposed scheme does not have the CFL time step restriction of the Eulerian method, allowing for a more efficient numerical realization for many application problems.