Monotonic solution of heterogeneous anisotropic diffusion problems

Anisotropic problems arise in various areas of science and engineering, for example groundwater transport and petroleum reservoir simulations. The pure diffusive anisotropic time-dependent transport problem is solved on a finite number of nodes, that are selected inside and on the boundary of the given domain, along with possible internal boundaries connecting some of the nodes. An unstructured triangular mesh, that attains the Generalized Anisotropic Delaunay condition for all the triangle sides, is automatically generated by properly connecting all the nodes, starting from an arbitrary initial one. The control volume of each node is the closed polygon given by the union of the midpoint of each side with the "anisotropic" circumcentre of each final triangle. A structure of the flux across the control volume sides similar to the standard Galerkin Finite Element scheme is derived. A special treatment of the flux computation, mainly based on edge swaps of the initial mesh triangles, is proposed in order to obtain a stiffness M-matrix system that guarantees the monotonicity of the solution. The proposed scheme is tested using several literature tests and the results are compared with analytical solutions, as well as with the results of other algorithms, in terms of convergence order. Computational costs are also investigated. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.