English

Computing effective diffusivity of chaotic and stochastic flows using structure preserving schemes

Numerical Analysis 2017-11-28 v1

Abstract

In this paper we study the problem of computing the effective diffusivity for a particle moving in chaotic and stochastic flows. In addition we numerically investigate the residual diffusion phenomenon in chaotic advection. The residual diffusion refers to the non-zero effective (homogenized) diffusion in the limit of zero molecular diffusion as a result of chaotic mixing of the streamlines. In this limit traditional numerical methods typically fail since the solutions of the advection-diffusion equation develop sharp gradients. Instead of solving the Fokker-Planck equation in the Eulerian formulation, we compute the motion of particles in the Lagrangian formulation, which is modelled by stochastic differential equations (SDEs). We propose a new numerical integrator based on a stochastic splitting method to solve the corresponding SDEs in which the deterministic subproblem is symplectic preserving while the random subproblem can be viewed as a perturbation. We provide rigorous error analysis for the new numerical integrator using the backward error analysis technique and show that our method outperforms standard Euler-based integrators. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method for several typical chaotic and stochastic flow problems of physical interests.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.09392,
  title  = {Computing effective diffusivity of chaotic and stochastic flows using structure preserving schemes},
  author = {Zhongjian Wang and Jack Xin and Zhiwen Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.09392},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:57:08.104Z