A Discontinuous Galerkin Method Based on a BGK Scheme for the Navier-Stokes Equations on Arbitrary Grids

A discontinuous Galerkin Method based on a Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) formulation is presented for the solution of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations on arbitrary grids. The idea behind this approach is to combine the robustness of the BGK scheme with the accuracy of the DG methods in an effort to develop a more accurate, efficient, and robust method for numerical simulations of viscous flows in a wide range of flow regimes. Unlike the traditional discontinuous Galerkin methods, where a Local Discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) formulation is usually used to discretize the viscous fluxes in the Navier-Stokes equations, this DG method uses a BGK scheme to compute the fluxes which not only couples the convective and dissipative terms together, but also includes both discontinuous and continuous representation in the flux evaluation at a cell interface through a simple hybrid gas distribution function. The developed method is used to compute a variety of viscous flow problems on arbitrary grids. The numerical results obtained by this BGKDG method are extremely promising and encouraging in terms of both accuracy and robustness, indicating its ability and potential to become not just a competitive but simply a superior approach than the current available numerical methods.     

A robust SN-DG-approximation for radiation transport in optically thick and diffusive regimes

We introduce a new discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method with reduced upwind stabilization for the linear Boltzmann equation applied to particle transport. The asymptotic analysis demonstrates that the new formulation does not suffer from the limitations of standard upwind methods in the thick diffusive regime; in particular, the new method yields the correct diffusion limit for any approximation order, including piecewise constant discontinuous finite elements. Numerical tests on well-established benchmark problems demonstrate the superiority of the new method. The improvement is particularly significant when employing piecewise constant DG approximation for which standard upwinding is known to perform poorly in the thick diffusion limit.     

On the use of the discontinuous Galerkin method for numerical simulation of two-dimensional compressible turbulence with shocks

In this paper, the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method combined with localized artificial diffusivity is investigated in the context of numerical simulation of broadband compressible turbulent flows with shocks for under-resolved cases. Firstly, the spectral property of the DG method is analyzed using the approximate dispersion relation (ADR) method and compared with typical finite difference methods, which reveals quantitatively that significantly less grid points can be used with DG for comparable numerical error. Then several typical test cases relevant to problems of compressible turbulence are simulated, including one-dimensional shock/entropy wave interaction, two-dimensional decaying isotropic turbulence, and two-dimensional temporal mixing layers. Numerical results indicate that higher numerical accuracy can be achieved on the same number of degrees of freedom with DG than high order finite difference schemes. Furthermore, shocks are also well captured using the localized artificial diffusivity method. The results in this work can provide useful guidance for further applications of DG to direct and large eddy simulation of compressible turbulent flows.     

A study of spectral element and discontinuous Galerkin methods for the Navier–Stokes equations in nonhydrostatic mesoscale atmospheric modeling: Equation sets and test cases

We present spectral element (SE) and discontinuous Galerkin (DG) solutions of the Euler and compressible Navier–Stokes (NS) equations for stratified fluid flow which are of importance in nonhydrostatic mesoscale atmospheric modeling. We study three different forms of the governing equations using seven test cases. Three test cases involve flow over mountains which require the implementation of non-reflecting boundary conditions, while one test requires viscous terms (density current). Including viscous stresses into finite difference, finite element, or spectral element models poses no additional challenges; however, including these terms to either finite volume or discontinuous Galerkin models requires the introduction of additional machinery because these methods were originally designed for first-order operators. We use the local discontinuous Galerkin method to overcome this obstacle. The seven test cases show that all of our models yield good results. The main conclusion is that equation set 1 (non-conservation form) does not perform as well as sets 2 and 3 (conservation forms). For the density current (viscous), the SE and DG models using set 3 (mass and total energy) give less dissipative results than the other equation sets; based on these results we recommend set 3 for the development of future multiscale research codes. In addition, the fact that set 3 conserves both mass and energy up to machine precision motives us to pursue this equation set for the development of future mesoscale models. For the bubble and mountain tests, the DG models performed better. Based on these results and due to its conservation properties we recommend the DG method. In the worst case scenario, the DG models are 50% slower than the non-conservative SE models. In the best case scenario, the DG models are just as efficient as the conservative SE models.     

Discontinuous Galerkin methods for dispersive and lossy Maxwell's equations and PML boundary conditions

In this paper, we will present a unified formulation of discontinuous Galerkin method (DGM) for Maxwell's equations in linear dispersive and lossy materials of Debye type and in the artificial perfectly matched layer (PML) regions. An auxiliary differential equation (ADE) method is used to handle the frequency-dependent constitutive relations with the help of auxiliary polarization currents in the computational and PML regions. The numerical flux for the dispersive lossy Maxwell's equations with the auxiliary polarization current variables is derived. Various numerical results are provided to validate the proposed formulation.     

Artificial boundary conditions for the numerical solution of the Euler equations by the discontinuous galerkin method

We present artificial boundary conditions for the numerical simulation of compressible flows using high-order accurate discretizations with the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method. The construction of the proposed boundary conditions is based on characteristic analysis and applied for boundaries with arbitrary shape and orientation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed boundary treatment enables to convect out of the computational domain complex flow features with little distortion. In addition, it is shown that small-amplitude acoustic disturbances could be convected out of the computational domain, with no significant deterioration of the overall accuracy of the method. Furthermore, it was found that application of the proposed boundary treatment for viscous flow over a cylinder yields superior performance compared to simple extrapolation methods.     

A Hermite WENO reconstruction-based discontinuous Galerkin method for the Euler equations on tetrahedral grids

A Hermite WENO reconstruction-based discontinuous Galerkin method RDG(P₁P₂), designed not only to enhance the accuracy of discontinuous Galerkin method but also to ensure linear stability of the RDG method, is presented for solving the compressible Euler equations on tetrahedral grids. In this RDG(P₁P₂) method, a quadratic polynomial solution (P₂) is first reconstructed using a least-squares method from the underlying linear polynomial (P₁) discontinuous Galerkin solution. By taking advantage of handily available and yet invaluable information, namely the derivatives in the DG formulation, the stencils used in the reconstruction involve only von Neumann neighborhood (adjacent face-neighboring cells) and thus are compact and consistent with the underlying DG method. The final quadratic polynomial solution is then obtained using a WENO reconstruction, which is necessary to ensure linear stability of the RDG method. The developed RDG method is used to compute a variety of flow problems on tetrahedral meshes to demonstrate its accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and versatility. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the developed RDG(P₁P₂) method is able to maintain the linear stability, achieve the designed third-order of accuracy: one order accuracy higher than the underlying DG method without significant increase in computing costs and storage requirements.     

Nonuniform time-step Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method for Computational Aeroacoustics

With many superior features, Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method (RKDG), which adopts Discontinuous Galerkin method (DG) for space discretization and Runge–Kutta method (RK) for time integration, has been an attractive alternative to the finite difference based high-order Computational Aeroacoustics (CAA) approaches. However, when it comes to complex physical problems, especially the ones involving irregular geometries, the time step size of an explicit RK scheme is limited by the smallest grid size in the computational domain, demanding a high computational cost for obtaining time accurate numerical solutions in CAA. For computational efficiency, high-order RK method with nonuniform time step sizes on nonuniform meshes is developed in this paper. In order to ensure correct communication of solutions on the interfaces of grids with different time step sizes, the values at intermediate-stages of the Runge–Kutta time integration on the elements neighboring such interfaces are coupled with minimal dissipation and dispersion errors. Based upon the general form of an explicit p-stage RK scheme, a linear coupling procedure is proposed, with details on the coefficient matrices and execution steps at common time-levels and intermediate time-levels. Applications of the coupling procedures to Runge–Kutta schemes frequently used in simulation of fluid flow and acoustics are given, including the third-order TVD scheme, and low-storage low dissipation and low dispersion (LDDRK) schemes. In addition, an analysis on the stability of coupling procedures on a nonuniform grid is carried out. For validation, numerical experiments on one-dimensional and two-dimensional problems are presented to illustrate the stability and accuracy of proposed nonuniform time-step RKDG scheme, as well as the computational benefits it brings. Application to a one-dimensional nonlinear problem is also investigated.     

A space–time hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method for incompressible flows on deforming domains

We present the first space–time hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) finite element method for the incompressible Navier–Stokes and Oseen equations. Major advantages of a space–time formulation are its excellent capabilities of dealing with moving and deforming domains and grids and its ability to achieve higher-order accurate approximations in both time and space by simply increasing the order of polynomial approximation in the space–time elements. Our formulation is related to the HDG formulation for incompressible flows introduced recently in, e.g., [N.C. Nguyen, J. Peraire, B. Cockburn, A hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method for Stokes flow, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Eng. 199 (2010) 582–597]. However, ours is inspired in typical DG formulations for compressible flows which allow for a more straightforward implementation. Another difference is the use of polynomials of fixed total degree with space–time hexahedral and quadrilateral elements, instead of simplicial elements. We present numerical experiments in order to assess the quality of the performance of the methods on deforming domains and to experimentally investigate the behavior of the convergence rates of each component of the solution with respect to the polynomial degree of the approximations in both space and time.     

Posteriori Error Estimation for an Interior Penalty Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Maxwell's Equations in Cold Plasma

In this paper, we develop a residual-based a posteriori error estimator for the time-dependent Maxwell's equations in the cold plasma. Here we consider a semi-discrete interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for solving the governing equations. We provide both the upper bound and lower bound analysis for the error estimator. This is the first posteriori error analysis carried out for the Maxwell's equations in dispersive media.     

Hybrid weighted essentially non-oscillatory schemes with different indicators

A key idea in finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes is a combination of lower order fluxes to obtain a higher order approximation. The choice of the weight to each candidate stencil, which is a nonlinear function of the grid values, is crucial to the success of WENO schemes. For the system case, WENO schemes are based on local characteristic decompositions and flux splitting to avoid spurious oscillation. But the cost of computation of nonlinear weights and local characteristic decompositions is very high. In this paper, we investigate hybrid schemes of WENO schemes with high order up-wind linear schemes using different discontinuity indicators and explore the possibility in avoiding the local characteristic decompositions and the nonlinear weights for part of the procedure, hence reducing the cost but still maintaining non-oscillatory properties for problems with strong shocks. The idea is to identify discontinuity by an discontinuity indicator, then reconstruct numerical flux by WENO approximation in discontinuous regions and up-wind linear approximation in smooth regions. These indicators are mainly based on the troubled-cell indicators for discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method which are listed in the paper by Qiu and Shu (J. Qiu, C.-W. Shu, A comparison of troubled-cell indicators for Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin methods using weighted essentially non-oscillatory limiters, SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing 27 (2005) 995–1013). The emphasis of the paper is on comparison of the performance of hybrid scheme using different indicators, with an objective of obtaining efficient and reliable indicators to obtain better performance of hybrid scheme to save computational cost. Detail numerical studies in one- and two-dimensional cases are performed, addressing the issues of efficiency (less CPU time and more accurate numerical solution), non-oscillatory property.     

Error estimation and anisotropic mesh refinement for 3d laminar aerodynamic flow simulations

This article considers a posteriori error estimation and anisotropic mesh refinement for three-dimensional laminar aerodynamic flow simulations. The optimal order symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin discretization which has previously been developed for the compressible Navier–Stokes equations in two dimensions is extended to three dimensions. Symmetry boundary conditions are given which allow to discretize and compute symmetric flows on the half model resulting in exactly the same flow solutions as if computed on the full model. Using duality arguments, an error estimation is derived for estimating the discretization error with respect to the aerodynamic force coefficients. Furthermore, residual-based indicators as well as adjoint-based indicators for goal-oriented refinement are derived. These refinement indicators are combined with anisotropy indicators which are particularly suited to the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretization. Two different approaches based on either a heuristic criterion or an anisotropic extension of the adjoint-based error estimation are presented. The performance of the proposed discretization, error estimation and adaptive mesh refinement algorithms is demonstrated for 3d aerodynamic flows.     

Polymorphic nodal elements and their application in discontinuous Galerkin methods

In this work, we discuss two different but related aspects of the development of efficient discontinuous Galerkin methods on hybrid element grids for the computational modeling of gas dynamics in complex geometries or with adapted grids. In the first part, a recursive construction of different nodal sets for hp finite elements is presented. They share the property that the nodes along the sides of the two-dimensional elements and along the edges of the three-dimensional elements are the Legendre–Gauss–Lobatto points. The different nodal elements are evaluated by computing the Lebesgue constants of the corresponding Vandermonde matrix. In the second part, these nodal elements are applied within the modal discontinuous Galerkin framework. We still use a modal based formulation, but introduce a nodal based integration technique to reduce computational cost in the spirit of pseudospectral methods. We illustrate the performance of the scheme on several large scale applications and discuss its use in a recently developed space-time expansion discontinuous Galerkin scheme.     

The Elastoplast Discontinuous Galerkin (EDG) method for the Navier–Stokes equations

The present work details the Elastoplast (this name is a translation from the French “sparadrap”, a concept first applied by Yves Morchoisne for Spectral methods [1]) Discontinuous Galerkin (EDG) method to solve the compressible Navier–Stokes equations. This method was first presented in 2009 at the ICOSAHOM congress with some Cartesian grid applications. We focus here on unstructured grid applications for which the EDG method seems very attractive. As in the Recovery method presented by van Leer and Nomura in 2005 for diffusion, jumps across element boundaries are locally eliminated by recovering the solution on an overlapping cell. In the case of Recovery, this cell is the union of the two neighboring cells and the Galerkin basis is twice as large as the basis used for one element. In our proposed method the solution is rebuilt through an L² projection of the discontinuous interface solution on a small rectangular overlapping interface element, named Elastoplast, with an orthogonal basis of the same order as the one in the neighboring cells. Comparisons on 1D and 2D scalar diffusion problems in terms of accuracy and stability with other viscous DG schemes are first given. Then, 2D results on acoustic problems, vortex problems and boundary layer problems both on Cartesian or unstructured triangular grids illustrate stability, precision and versatility of this method.     

Positivity preserving semi-Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin formulation: Theoretical analysis and application to the Vlasov–Poisson system

Semi-Lagrangian (SL) methods have been very popular in the Vlasov simulation community , , , , , ,  and . In this paper, we propose a new Strang split SL discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for solving the Vlasov equation. Specifically, we apply the Strang splitting for the Vlasov equation [6], as a way to decouple the nonlinear Vlasov system into a sequence of 1-D advection equations, each of which has an advection velocity that only depends on coordinates that are transverse to the direction of propagation. To evolve the decoupled linear equations, we propose to couple the SL framework with the semi-discrete DG formulation. The proposed SL DG method is free of time step restriction compared with the Runge–Kutta DG method, which is known to suffer from numerical time step limitation with relatively small CFL numbers according to linear stability analysis. We apply the recently developed positivity preserving (PP) limiter [37], which is a low-cost black box procedure, to our scheme to ensure the positivity of the unknown probability density function without affecting the high order accuracy of the base SL DG scheme. We analyze the stability and accuracy properties of the SL DG scheme by establishing its connection with the direct and weak formulations of the characteristics/Lagrangian Galerkin method [23]. The quality of the proposed method is demonstrated via basic test problems, such as linear advection and rigid body rotation, and via classical plasma problems, such as Landau damping and the two stream instability.     

A reconstructed discontinuous Galerkin method for the compressible Navier–Stokes equations on arbitrary grids

A reconstruction-based discontinuous Galerkin (RDG) method is presented for the solution of the compressible Navier–Stokes equations on arbitrary grids. The RDG method, originally developed for the compressible Euler equations, is extended to discretize viscous and heat fluxes in the Navier–Stokes equations using a so-called inter-cell reconstruction, where a smooth solution is locally reconstructed using a least-squares method from the underlying discontinuous DG solution. Similar to the recovery-based DG (rDG) methods, this reconstructed DG method eliminates the introduction of ad hoc penalty or coupling terms commonly found in traditional DG methods. Unlike rDG methods, this RDG method does not need to judiciously choose a proper form of a recovered polynomial, thus is simple, flexible, and robust, and can be used on arbitrary grids. The developed RDG method is used to compute a variety of flow problems on arbitrary meshes to demonstrate its accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and versatility. The numerical results indicate that this RDG method is able to deliver the same accuracy as the well-known Bassi–Rebay II scheme, at a half of its computing costs for the discretization of the viscous fluxes in the Navier–Stokes equations, clearly demonstrating its superior performance over the existing DG methods for solving the compressible Navier–Stokes equations.     

Robust high order discontinuous Galerkin schemes for two-dimensional gaseous detonations

One of the main challenges in computational simulations of gas detonation propagation is that negative density or negative pressure may emerge during the time evolution, which will cause blow-ups. Therefore, schemes with provable positivity-preserving of density and pressure are desired. First order and second order positivity-preserving schemes were well studied, e.g., [6], [10]. For high order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method, even though the characteristicwise TVB limiter in [1], [2] can kill oscillations, it is not sufficient to maintain the positivity. A simple solution for arbitrarily high order positivity-preserving schemes solving Euler equations was proposed recently in [22]. In this paper, we first discuss an extension of the technique in [22], [23], [24] to design arbitrarily high order positivity-preserving DG schemes for reactive Euler equations. We then present a simpler and more robust implementation of the positivity-preserving limiter than the one in [22]. Numerical tests, including very demanding examples in gaseous detonations, indicate that the third order DG scheme with the new positivity-preserving limiter produces satisfying results even without the TVB limiter.     

On the flexibility of agglomeration based physical space discontinuous Galerkin discretizations

In this work we show that the flexibility of the discontinuous Galerkin (dG) discretization can be fruitfully exploited to implement numerical solution strategies based on the use of elements with very general shapes. Thanks to the freedom in defining the mesh topology, we propose a new h-adaptive technique based on agglomeration coarsening of a fine mesh. The possibility to enhance the error distribution over the computational domain is investigated on a Poisson problem with the goal of obtaining a mesh independent discretization.The main building block of our dG method consists of defining discrete polynomial spaces directly on physical frame elements. For this purpose we orthonormalize with respect to the L²-product a set of monomials relocated in a specific element frame and we introduce an easy way to reduce the cost related to numerical integration on agglomerated meshes. To complete the dG formulation for second order problems, two extensions of the BR2 scheme to arbitrary polyhedral grids, including an estimate of the stabilization parameter ensuring the coercivity property, are here proposed.     

A local discontinuous Galerkin method for directly solving Hamilton–Jacobi equations

In this paper we propose a new local discontinuous Galerkin method to directly solve Hamilton–Jacobi equations. The scheme is a natural extension of the monotone scheme. For the linear case with constant coefficients, the method is equivalent to the discontinuous Galerkin method for conservation laws. Thus, stability and error analysis are obtained under the framework of conservation laws. For both convex and noneconvex Hamiltonian, optimal (k + 1)th order of accuracy for smooth solutions are obtained with piecewise kth order polynomial approximations. The scheme is numerically tested on a variety of one and two dimensional problems. The method works well to capture sharp corners (discontinuous derivatives) and have the solution converges to the viscosity solution.     

On maximum-principle-satisfying high order schemes for scalar conservation laws

We construct uniformly high order accurate schemes satisfying a strict maximum principle for scalar conservation laws. A general framework (for arbitrary order of accuracy) is established to construct a limiter for finite volume schemes (e.g. essentially non-oscillatory (ENO) or weighted ENO (WENO) schemes) or discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method with first order Euler forward time discretization solving one-dimensional scalar conservation laws. Strong stability preserving (SSP) high order time discretizations will keep the maximum principle. It is straightforward to extend the method to two and higher dimensions on rectangular meshes. We also show that the same limiter can preserve the maximum principle for DG or finite volume schemes solving two-dimensional incompressible Euler equations in the vorticity stream-function formulation, or any passive convection equation with an incompressible velocity field. Numerical tests for both the WENO finite volume scheme and the DG method are reported.