Sharp uniform in time error estimate on a stochastic structure-preserving Lagrangian method and computation of effective diffusivity in 3D chaotic flows

In this paper, we study the problem of computing the effective diffusivity for a particle moving in chaotic flows. Instead of solving a convection-diffusion type cell problem in the Eulerian formulation (arising from homogenization theory for the Fokker-Planck equation), we compute the motion of particles in the Lagrangian formulation, which is modeled by stochastic differential equations (SDEs). A robust numerical integrator based on a splitting method was proposed to solve the SDEs and a rigorous error analysis for the numerical integrator was provided using the backward error analysis (BEA) technique [29]. However, the upper bound in the error estimate is not sharp. In this paper, we propose a completely new and sharp error analysis for the numerical integrator that allows us to get rid of the exponential growth factor in our previous error estimate. Our new error analysis is based on a probabilistic approach, which interprets the solution process generated by our numerical integrator as a Markov process. By exploring the ergodicity of the solution process, we prove the convergence analysis of our method in computing the effective diffusivity over infinite time. We present numerical results to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method in computing effective diffusivity for several chaotic flows, especially the Arnold-Beltrami-Childress (ABC) flow and the Kolmogorov flow in three-dimensional space.