Pollutant transport by shallow water equations on unstructured meshes: Hyperbolization of the model and numerical solution via a novel flux splitting scheme

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, using the Cattaneo's relaxation approach, we reformulate the system of governing equations for the pollutant transport by shallow water flows over non-flat topography and anisotropic diffusion as hyperbolic balance laws with stiff source terms. The proposed relaxation system circumvents the infinite wave speed paradox which is inherent in standard advection-diffusion models. This turns out to give a larger stability range for the choice of the time step. Second, following a flux splitting approach, we derive a novel numerical method to discretise the resulting problem. In particular, we propose a new flux splitting and study the associated two systems of differential equations, called the “hydrodynamic” and the “relaxed diffusive” system, respectively. For the presented splitting we analyse the resulting two systems of differential equations and propose two discretisation schemes of the Godunov-type. These schemes are simple to implement, robust, accurate and fast when compared with existing methods. The resulting method is implemented on unstructured meshes and is systematically assessed for accuracy, robustness and efficiency on a carefully selected suite of test problems including non-flat topography and wetting and drying problems. Formal second order accuracy is assessed through convergence rates studies.