High-order accurate well-balanced energy stable finite difference schemes for multi-layer shallow water equations on fixed and adaptive moving meshes

This paper develops high-order accurate well-balanced (WB) energy stable (ES) finite difference schemes for multi-layer (the number of layers M >= 2) shallow water equations (SWEs) with non-flat bottom topography on both fixed and adaptive moving meshes, extending our previous work on the single-layer shallow water magnetohydrodynamics [25] and single-layer SWEs on adaptive moving meshes [58]. To obtain an energy inequality, the convexity of an energy function for an arbitrary M is proved by finding recurrence relations of the leading principal minors or the quadratic forms of the Hessian matrix of the energy function with respect to the conservative variables, which is more involved than the single-layer case due to the coupling between the layers in the energy function. An important ingredient in developing high-order semi-discrete ES schemes is the construction of a two-point energy conservative (EC) numerical flux. In pursuit of the WB property, a sufficient condition for such EC fluxes is given with compatible discretizations of the source terms similar to the single-layer case. It can be decoupled into M identities individually for each layer, making it convenient to construct a two-point EC flux for the multi-layer system. To suppress possible oscillations near discontinuities, WENO-based dissipation terms are added to the high-order WB EC fluxes, which gives semi-discrete high-order WB ES schemes. Fully-discrete schemes are obtained by employing high-order explicit strong stability preserving Runge-Kutta methods and proved to preserve the lake at rest. The schemes are further extended to moving meshes based on a modified energy function for a reformulated system, relying on the techniques proposed in [58]. Numerical experiments are conducted for some two- and three-layer cases to validate the high-order accuracy, WB and ES properties, and high efficiency of the schemes, with a suitable amount of dissipation chosen by estimating the maximal wave speed due to the lack of an analytical expression for the eigenstructure of the multi-layer system.