English

Beyond Free-Stream Preservation: Transport Polynomial Exactness for Moving-Mesh Methods under Arbitrary Mesh Motion

Numerical Analysis 2026-02-11 v1 Numerical Analysis

Abstract

High-order moving-mesh methods can effectively reduce numerical diffusion, but their formal accuracy typically relies on the regularity of the mesh velocity. This dependency creates a fundamental conflict in the numerical solution of hyperbolic conservation laws, where solution-driven adaptation may induce nonsmooth mesh motion, thereby degrading convergence order. We introduce \emph{transport polynomial exactness} (TPE(kk)), a mesh-motion-independent criterion that generalizes classical free-stream preservation (TPE(0)) to the exact advection of degree-kk polynomials. We show that the classical geometric conservation law (GCL) is insufficient to ensure TPE(kk) for k1k \ge 1 due to mismatches in higher-order geometric moments. To resolve this, we propose \emph{evolved geometric moments} (EGMs), obtained by solving auxiliary transport equations discretized compatibly with the physical variables. We rigorously prove that second-degree EGMs evolved via the third-order strong stability preserving Runge--Kutta (SSPRK3) method coincide with the exact geometric moments. This exactness arises from a \emph{superconvergence} mechanism wherein SSPRK3 reduces to Simpson's rule for EGM evolution. Leveraging this result, we construct a third-order conservative finite-volume rezoning moving-mesh scheme. The scheme satisfies the TPE(2) property for \emph{arbitrary mesh motion} and \emph{any pseudo-time step size}, thereby naturally accommodating spatiotemporally discontinuous mesh velocity. Crucially, this \emph{breaks the efficiency bottleneck} in the conventional advection-based remapping step and reduces the required pseudo-time levels from O(h1)\mathcal{O}(h^{-1}) to O(1)\mathcal{O}(1) under bounded but discontinuous mesh velocity. Numerical experiments verify exact quadratic transport and stable third-order convergence under extreme mesh deformation, demonstrating substantial efficiency gains.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.09729,
  title  = {Beyond Free-Stream Preservation: Transport Polynomial Exactness for Moving-Mesh Methods under Arbitrary Mesh Motion},
  author = {Chaoyi Cai and Qiqin Cheng and Di Wu and Jianxian Qiu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.09729},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:29:38.424Z