Machine Learning Changes the Rules for Flux Limiters

Abstract: Learning to integrate non-linear equations from highly resolved direct numerical simulations (DNSs) has seen recent interest for reducing the computational load for fluid simulations. Here, we focus on determining a flux-limiter for shock capturing methods. Focusing on flux limiters provides a specific plug-and-play component for existing numerical methods. Since their introduction, an array of flux limiters has been designed. Using the coarse-grained Burgers' equation, we show that flux-limiters may be rank-ordered in terms of their log-error relative to high-resolution data. We then develop theory to find an optimal flux-limiter and present flux-limiters that outperform others tested for integrating Burgers' equation on lattices with $2\times$, $3\times$, $4\times$, and $8\times$ coarse-grainings. We train a continuous piecewise linear limiter by minimizing the mean-squared misfit to 6-grid point segments of high-resolution data, averaged over all segments. While flux limiters are generally designed to have an output of $\phi(r) = 1$ at a flux ratio of $r = 1$, our limiters are not bound by this rule, and yet produce a smaller error than standard limiters. We find that our machine learned limiters have distinctive features that may provide new rules-of-thumb for the development of improved limiters. Additionally, we use our theory to learn flux-limiters that outperform standard limiters across a range of values (as opposed to at a specific fixed value) of coarse-graining, number of discretized bins, and diffusion parameter. This demonstrates the ability to produce flux limiters that should be more broadly useful than standard limiters for general applications.