Discontinuous Galerkin via Interpolation: The Direct Flux Reconstruction Method

We further investigate the high order positivity-preserving discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for linear hyperbolic and radiative transfer equations developed in Yuan et al. (SIAM J Sci Comput 38:A2987–A3019, 2016). The DG methods in Yuan et al. (2016) can maintain positivity and high order accuracy, but they rely both on the scaling limiter in Zhang and Shu (J Comput Phys 229:8918–8934, 2010) and a rotational limiter, the latter may alter cell averages of the unmodulated DG scheme, thereby affecting conservation. Even though a Lax–Wendroff type theorem is proved in Yuan et al. (2016), guaranteeing convergence to weak solutions with correct shock speed when such rotational limiter is applied, it would still be desirable if a conservative DG method without changing the cell averages can be obtained which has both high order accuracy and positivity-preserving capability. In this paper, we develop and analyze such a DG method for both linear hyperbolic equations and radiative transfer equations. In the one-dimensional case, the method uses traditional DG space $$P^k$$ of piecewise polynomials of degree at most k. A key result is proved that the unmodulated DG solver in this case can maintain positivity of the cell average if the inflow boundary value and the source term are both positive, therefore the positivity-preserving framework in Zhang and Shu (2010) can be used to obtain a high order conservative positivity-preserving DG scheme. Unfortunately, in two-dimensions this is no longer the case. We show that the unmodulated DG solver based either on $$P^k$$ or $$Q^k$$ spaces (piecewise kth degree polynomials or piecewise tensor-product kth degree polynomials) could generate negative cell averages. We augment the DG space with additional functions so that the positivity of cell averages from the unmodulated DG solver can be restored, thereby leading to high order conservative positivity-preserving DG scheme based on these augmented DG spaces following the framework in Zhang and Shu (2010). Computational results are provided to demonstrate the good performance of our DG schemes.

High-order methods are quickly becoming popular for turbulent flows as the amount of computer processing power increases. The flux reconstruction (FR) method presents a unifying framework for a wide class of high-order methods including discontinuous Galerkin (DG), Spectral Difference (SD), and Spectral Volume (SV). It offers a simple, efficient, and easy way to implement nodal-based methods that are derived via the differential form of the governing equations. Whereas high-order methods have enjoyed recent success, they have been known to introduce numerical instabilities due to polynomial aliasing when applied to under-resolved nonlinear problems. Aliasing errors have been extensively studied in reference to DG methods; however, their study regarding FR methods has mostly been limited to the selection of the nodal points used within each cell. Here, we extend some of the de-aliasing techniques used for DG methods, primarily over-integration, to the FR framework. Our results show that over-integration does remove aliasing errors but may not remove all instabilities caused by insufficient resolution (for FR as well as DG).

Fourier analysis and evaluation of DG, FD and compact difference methods for conservation laws

An efficient second-order cell-centered Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for solving two-dimensional (2D) elastic-plastic flows with the hypo-elastic constitutive model and von Mises yield condition is presented. First, starting from the governing equations of conserved quantities in the Euler framework, the integral weak formulation of them in the Lagrangian framework is derived. Next, the DG method is used for spatial discretization of both the weak formulation of conserved quantities and the evolution equation of deviatoric stress tensor. The Taylor basis functions defined in the reference coordinates provide the piecewise polynomial expansion of the variables, including the conserved quantities and the deviatoric stress tensor. The vertex velocities and Cauchy stress tensor on the edges are computed using a nodal solver equipped with a variant of Li's new Harten-Lax-van Leer-contact approximate Riemann solver [Li et al., “An HLLC-type approximate Riemann solver for two-dimensional elastic-perfectly plastic model,” J. Comput. Phys. 448, 110675 (2022)], in which the longitudinal wave velocity in the plastic state is modified. Then the vertex velocities and Cauchy stress tensor on the edges are used to compute numerical fluxes. A second-order total variation diminishing Runge–Kutta scheme is used for time discretization of both the governing equations of conserved quantities and the evolution equation of deviatoric stress tensor. After solving the evolution equation of deviatoric stress tensor, a radial return algorithm is performed at the Gauss points of each element according to the von Mises yield condition. And then the coefficients of the DG expansion for the deviatoric stress tensor on each element are modified by a least squares procedure using the deviatoric stress tensors at these Gauss points. To achieve second-order accuracy, the least squares procedure is used for piecewise linear reconstruction of conserved quantities and the deviatoric stress tensor, and the Barth–Jespersen limiter is used to suppress the nonphysical numerical oscillation near the discontinuities. After that, the coefficients of the DG expansion are modified through L2 projection using the reconstructed polynomials. Finally, a second-order cell-centered Lagrangian DG scheme is established. Several tests demonstrate that the new scheme achieves second-order accuracy with good robustness, and that the DG method of updating the deviatoric stress tensor has comparable accuracy and much higher efficiency with mesh refinement compared with previous works.

Split form ALE discontinuous Galerkin methods with applications to under-resolved turbulent low-Mach number flows

Coupling local discontinuous and continuous galerkin methods for flow problems

This paper focuses on the adaptive discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for the tempered fractional (convection) diffusion equations. The DG schemes with interior penalty for the diffusion term and numerical flux for the convection term are used to solve the equations, and the detailed stability and convergence analyses are provided. Based on the derived posteriori error estimates, the local error indicator is designed. The theoretical results and the effectiveness of the adaptive DG methods are respectively verified and displayed by the extensive numerical experiments. The strategy of designing adaptive schemes presented in this paper works for the general PDEs with fractional operators.

In this work the numerical discretization of the partial differential governing equations for compressible and incompressible flows is dealt within the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) framework along space–time adaptive meshes. Two main numerical frameworks can be distinguished: (1) fully explicit ADER-DG methods on collocated grids for compressible fluids (2) spectral semi-implicit and spectral space–time DG methods on edge-based staggered grids for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. In this work, the high-resolution properties of the aforementioned numerical methods are significantly enhanced within a 'cell-by-cell' Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) implementation together with time accurate local time stepping (LTS). It is a well known fact that a major weakness of high order DG methods lies in the difficulty of limiting discontinuous solutions, which generate spurious oscillations, namely the so-called 'Gibbs phenomenon'. Over the years, several attempts have been made to cope with this problem and different kinds of limiters have been proposed. In this work the nonlinear stabilization of the scheme is sequentially and locally introduced only for troubled cells on the basis of a multidimensional optimal order detection (MOOD) criterion. ADER-DG is a novel, communication-avoiding family of algorithms, which achieves high order of accuracy in time not via the standard multi-stage Runge–Kutta (RK) time discretization like most other DG schemes, but at the aid of an element-local predictor stage. In practice the method first produces a so-called candidate solution by using a high order accurate unlimited DG scheme. Then, in those cells where at least one of the chosen admissibility criteria is violated the computed candidate solution is detected as troubled and is locally rejected. Next, the numerical solution of the previous time step is scattered onto cell averages on a suitable sub-grid in order to preserve the natural sub-cell resolution of the DG scheme. Then, a more reliable numerical solution is recomputed a posteriori by employing a more robust but still very accurate ADER-WENO finite volume scheme on the sub-grid averages within that troubled cell. Finally, a high order DG polynomial is reconstructed back from the evolved sub-cell averages. In the ADER-DG framework several PDE system are investigated, ranging from the Euler equations of compressible gas dynamics, over the viscous and resistive magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD), to special and general relativistic MHD. Indeed, the adopted formalism is quite general, leading to a novel family of adaptive ADER-DG schemes suitable for hyperbolic systems of partial differential equations in which the numerical fluxes also depend on the gradient of the state vector because of the parabolic nature of diffusive terms. The presented results show clearly that the high-resolution and shock-capturing capabilities of the news schemes are significantly enhanced within the cell-by-cell AMR implementation together with time accurate LTS. A special treatment has been followed for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. In fact, the elliptic character of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations introduces an important difficulty in their numerical solution: whenever the smallest physical or numerical perturbation arises in the fluid flow then it will instantaneously affect the entire computational domain. Thus, a semi-implicit approach has been used. The main advantage of making use of a semi-implicit discretization is that the numerical stability can be obtained for large time-steps without leading to an excessive computational demand. In this context, we derived two new families of spectral semi-implicit and spectral space–time DG methods for the solution of the two and three dimensional Navier–Stokes equations on edge-based adaptive staggered Cartesian grids. The discrete solutions of pressure and velocity are expressed in the form of piecewise polynomials along different meshes. While the pressure is defined on the control volumes of the main grid, the velocity components are defined on edge-based dual control volumes, leading to a spatially staggered mesh. In the first family, high order of accuracy is achieved only in space, while a simple semi-implicit time discretization is derived by introducing an implicitness factor $$\theta \in [0.5,1]$$ for the pressure gradient in the momentum equation. The real advantages of the staggering arise after substituting the discrete momentum equation into the weak form of the continuity equation. In fact, the resulting linear system for the pressure is symmetric and positive definite and either block penta-diagonal (in 2D) or block hepta-diagonal (in 3D). As a consequence, the pressure system can be solved very efficiently by means of a classical matrix-free conjugate gradient method. The resulting algorithm is stable, computationally very efficient, and at the same time arbitrary high order accurate in both space and time. This new numerical method has been thoroughly validated for approximation polynomials of degree up to $$N = 12$$, using a large set of non-trivial test problems in two and three space dimensions, for which either analytical, numerical or experimental reference solutions exist.

High-order entropy-stable discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for nonlinear conservation laws reproduce a discrete entropy inequality by combining entropy conservative finite volume fluxes with summation-by-parts (SBP) discretization matrices. In the DG context, on tensor product (quadrilateral and hexahedral) elements, SBP matrices are typically constructed by collocating at Lobatto quadrature points. Recent work has extended the construction of entropy-stable DG schemes to collocation at more accurate Gauss quadrature points (Chan et al. in SIAM J Sci Comput 41(5):A2938–A2966, 2019) . In this work, we extend entropy-stable Gauss collocation schemes to non-conforming meshes. Entropy-stable DG schemes require computing entropy conservative numerical fluxes between volume and surface quadrature nodes. On conforming tensor product meshes where volume and surface nodes are aligned, flux evaluations are required only between “lines” of nodes. However, on non-conforming meshes, volume and surface nodes are no longer aligned, resulting in a larger number of flux evaluations. We reduce this expense by introducing an entropy-stable mortar-based treatment of non-conforming interfaces via a face-local correction term, and provide necessary conditions for high-order accuracy. Numerical experiments for the compressible Euler equations in two and three dimensions confirm the stability and accuracy of this approach.

Discontinuous Galerkin methods for simulating bioreactive transport of viruses in porous media

The aim of this work is to provide a solver for viscoelastic multi-phase flows within the Bounded Support Spectral Solver (BoSSS) currently under development at the Chair of Fluid Dynamics at the Technical University of Darmstadt. The discretisation in BoSSS consists of a high-order Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for single-phase flow and a high-order eXtended Discontinuous Galerkin (XDG) method for the multi-phase purpose. The solver shall be used to investigate numerically the behaviour of viscoelastic droplets. The macroscopic Oldroyd B model which is used in a wide range of applications is chosen as the constitutive model. A detailed derivation of the system of equations including the modeling principles for the Oldroyd B model is presented. A DG discretisation of the system of equations including the Local Discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method is presented after introducing the field of the DG method. The derivation of appropriate flux functions for the constitutive equations and the extra stress tensor are one of the key derivations of this scientific work. Difficulties arising in the numerical solution of viscoelastic flow problems for higher Weissenberg numbers for different discretisation methods are due to the convection dominated, mixed hyperbolic-elliptic-parabolic nature of the system of equations. Several strategies are presented which overcome these problems and are known from the literature. A key achievement of this scientific work is the application of the LDG method, originally developed for a hyperbolic system of equations for a Newtonian fluid, on the viscoelastic system of equations which renders methods for preserving ellipticity unnecessary. Furthermore, various strategiesn to enhance and to support convergence of the solution of the DG discretised system are presented. These are the Newton method with different approaches determining the Jacobian of the system, a homotopy continuation method based on the Weissenberg number for a better initial guess for the Newton method, and a troubled cell indicator combined with an artificial diffusion approach or an adaptive mesh refinement strategy, respectively. For the completeness of this work the XDG method is presented using a sharp interface approach with a signed distance level-set function as it is implemented in BoSSS. The single-phase solver is combined with these methods and appropriate flux functions for the interface are implemented to enable multi-phase applications for viscoelastic fluid. Several numerical experiments are conducted to verify and to validate the viscoelastic singlephase solver and to show the capability of the viscoelastic multi-phase solver to simulate viscoelastic droplets. Advantages and disadvantages of the implementation and an outlook for future research can be found in the conclusion.

The discontinuous Galerkin (dG) method was introduced by Reed and Hill [73] in 1973 for steady-state neutron transport as an hyperbolic problem. This was followed by other studies; by Bassi and Rebay [12] for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, Cockburn and Shu [31] developed the local discontinuous Galerkin (ldG) method for advection-diffusion equations, and Peraire and Persson [69] introduced the compact discontinuous Galerkin (cdG) method. Independent of the dG methods, interior penalty (IP) methods have been developed for elliptic and parabolic problems by Douglas and Dupont [40] and Wheeler [95]. Then, in the 1980’s, Arnold et al. [6] proposed a unified classification and analysis of various kinds of dG methods. Later on, the dG methods were developed for elliptic problems [8, 24, 77] and for problems with advection [7, 14, 51, 56].

Cavities are strong scattering parts for an aircraft. A discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method is presented to efficiently optimize cavity scattering. The DG method is shown to have ability of only remeshing the optimized parts and not remeshing the whole cavity in the computing process of scattering from the whole cavity. An effective and simple preconditioner, called distance sparse preconditioner (DSP), is applied to the DG method, different from the conventional block-diagonal preconditioner (BDP) and sparse approximate inverse preconditioner (SAI). The former one is usually recommended in the DG methods and the latter one is generally used in method of moment (MoM). Numerical results show that the DSP is more efficient than the BDP and SAI in the DG method for the cavity analysis. The effects of cavity opening shape, area, and transition shape are studied for scattering from cavities. Some interesting and useful numerical results are presented for cavity design.

To simulate accurately and efficiently aerospace-type flows using solely first-order PDE models, new numerical methods may be required to overcome difficulties introduced by the model. We consider a Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method that has been shown to possess an asymptotic preservation (AP) property for one-dimensional hyperbolic relaxation systems, in an effort to understand the source of this property and to determine if this property persists for problems in which we are interested. Comparison with traditional MUSCL schemes suggests that the source of the known AP property results from a coupling of the flux and source terms by the direct evolution of the solution slope. For a canonical model problem in a single spatial dimension, we use Von Neumann analysis to demonstrate that the limiting flux function of the DG scheme is of the Harten-Lax-Van Leer type. Further Von Neumann analysis of both a MUSCL scheme and the DG scheme show that near equilibrium, both methods have mesh size restrictions related to the resolution of physical dissipation. The DG scheme is less numerically dissipative than the HR scheme in this limit. Numerical simulations demonstrate these findings in one dimension. In one and two dimensions, our numerical results demonstrate that the convergence rate of the DG scheme eventually drops as the mesh is refined.

Discontinuous Galerkin methods for Maxwell’s equations in Drude metamaterials on unstructured meshes