A high-order parallel Eulerian-Lagrangian algorithm for advection-diffusion problems on unstructured meshes

In this paper, we present a high-order discontinuous Galerkin Eulerian-Lagrangian method for the solution of advection-diffusion problems on staggered unstructured meshes in two and three space dimensions. The particle trajectories are tracked backward in time by means of a high-order representation of the velocity field and a linear mapping from the physical to a reference system, hence obtaining a very simple and efficient strategy that permits to follow the Lagrangian trajectories throughout the computational domain. The use of an Eulerian-Lagrangian discretization increases the overall computational efficiency of the scheme because it is the only explicit method for the discretization of convective terms that admits large time steps without imposing a Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy–type stability condition. This property is fully exploited in this work by relying on a semi-implicit discretization of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, in which the pressure is discretized implicitly; thus, the sound speed does not play any role in the restriction of the maximum admissible time step. The resulting mild Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy stability condition, which is based only on the fluid velocity, is here overcome by the adoption of the Eulerian-Lagrangian method for the advection terms and an implicit scheme for the diffusive part of the governing equations. As a consequence, the novel algorithm is able to run simulation with a time step that is defined by the user, depending on the desired efficiency and time scale of the physical phenomena under consideration. Finally, a complete Message Passing Interface parallelization of the code is presented, showing that our approach can reach up to 96% of scaling efficiency.