A virtual element method‐based positivity‐preserving conservative scheme for convection–diffusion problems on polygonal meshes

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a positivity-preserving conservative scheme based on the virtual element method (VEM) to solve convection-diffusion problems on general meshes. As an extension of finite element methods to general polygonal elements, the VEM has many advantages such as substantial mathematical foundations, simplicity in implementation. However, it is neither positivity-preserving nor locally conservative. The purpose of this article is to develop a new scheme, which has the same accuracy as the VEM and preserves the positivity of the numerical solution and local conservation on primary grids. The first step is to calculate the cell-vertex values by the lowest-order VEM. Then, the nonlinear two-point flux approximations are utilized to obtain the nonnegativity of cell-centered values and the local conservation property. The new scheme inherits both advantages of the VEM and the nonlinear two-point flux approximations. Numerical results show that the new scheme can reach the optimal convergence order of the virtual element theory, that is, the second-order accuracy for the solution and the first-order accuracy for its gradient. Moreover, the obtained cell-centered values are nonnegative, which demonstrates the positivity-preserving property of our new scheme.