Comparison study of some finite volume and finite element methods for the shallow water equations with bottom topography and friction terms

We present a comparison of two discretization methods for the shallow water equations, namely the finite volume method and the finite element scheme. A reliable model for practical interests includes terms modelling the bottom topography as well as the friction effects. The resulting equations belong to the class of systems of hyperbolic partial differential equations of first order with zero order source terms, the so-called balance laws. In order to approximate correctly steady equilibrium states we need to derive a well-balanced approximation of the source term in the finite volume framework. As a result our finite volume method, a genuinely multidimensional finite volume evolution Galerkin (FVEG) scheme, approximates correctly steady states as well as their small perturbations (quasi-steady states). The second discretization scheme, which has been used for practical river flow simulations, is the finite element method (FEM). In contrary to the FVEG scheme, which is a time explicit scheme, the FEM uses an implicit time discretization and the Newton-Raphson iterative scheme for inner iterations. We show that both discretization techniques approximate correctly steady and quasi-steady states with bottom topography and friction and compare their accuracy and performance. (c) 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.