Bilinearity Preserving Algebraic Flux Correction

Abstract

Algebraic flux correction schemes for convection--diffusion--reaction equations rely on linearity preservation to avoid unnecessary artificial diffusion: the limiter is inactive whenever the discrete solution is affine. On quadrilateral and hexahedral meshes, this is insufficient, since the finite element space also contains bilinear functions that are reproduced exactly on axis-aligned meshes. We show that a mesh patch admits bilinearity preservation if and only if the central node lies in the convex hull of its neighbours after lifting each neighbour by the product of its coordinate differences, and we derive a sharp explicit value for the limiter parameter on such patches when the cell edges are parallel to the coordinate axes. We further characterize the meshes on which a mapped bilinear finite element space reproduces a bilinear function exactly, thereby establishing a fundamental limitation on what any limiter can achieve on general quadrilaterals. Numerical experiments confirm the theory: on axis-aligned grids, the proposed limiter reproduces a bilinear solution to the accuracy of the nonlinear iteration, whereas the linearity-preserving limiter does not. A sensitivity study shows that the parameter required for bilinearity preservation lies close to the upper end of the range for which the nonlinear problem can be solved by the fixed-point iteration considered here.