Proper orthogonal decomposition of discontinuous solutions with the Gegenbauer post-processing

Abstract

The proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method for time-dependent problems significantly reduces the computational time as it reduces the original problem to the lower dimensional space. Even a higher degree of reduction can be reached if the solution is smooth in space and time. However, if the solution is discontinuous and the discontinuity is parameterized e.g. with time, the POD approximations are not accurate in the reduced space due to the lack of ability to represent the discontinuous solution as a finite linear combination of smooth bases. In this paper, we propose to post-process the sample solutions and re-initialize the POD approximations to deal with discontinuous solutions and provide accurate approximations while the computational time is reduced. For the post-processing, we use the Gegenbauer reconstruction method. Then we regularize the Gegenbauer reconstruction for the construction of POD bases. With the constructed POD bases, we solve the given PDE in the reduced space. For the POD approximation, we re-initialize the POD solution so that the post-processed sample solution is used as the initial condition at each sampling time. As a proof-of-concept, we solve both one-dimensional linear and nonlinear hyperbolic problems. The numerical results show that the proposed method is efficient and accurate.