Effective Source Term Discretizations for Higher Accuracy Finite Volume Discretization of Parabolic Equations

A finite volume method is applied to develop space-time discretizations for parabolic equations based on an equation error method.A space-time expansion of the local equation error based on flux integral formulation of the equation is first designed using a desiredframework of neighboring quadrature points for the solution and local source terms. The quadrature weights are then determined through aminimization process for the error which constitutes all local compact fluxes about each centroid within the computational domain.In utilizing a local source term distribution to account for diffusive fluxes, the right minimizing quadrature weights and collocationpoints including subgrid points for the source terms may be determined and optimized for higher accuracies as well as robust higher-ordercomputational convergence. The resulting local residuals form a more complete description of the truncation errors which are then utilizedto assess the computational performances of the resulting schemes. The effectiveness of the discretization method is demonstrated by theresults and analysis of the schemes.