A Posteriori Subcell Limiting of the Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method for Hyperbolic Conservation Laws

Michael Dumbser, Olindo Zanotti, Raphael Loubere, Steven Diot

Published 2014-06-28, updated 2015-03-10Version 3

The purpose of this work is to propose a novel a posteriori finite volume subcell limiter technique for the Discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for nonlinear systems of hyperbolic conservation laws in multiple space dimensions that works well for arbitrary high order of accuracy in space and time and that does not destroy the natural subcell resolution properties of the DG method. High order time discretization is achieved via a one-step ADER approach that uses a local space-time discontinuous Galerkin predictor method. Our new limiting strategy is based on the so-called MOOD paradigm, which aposteriori verifies the validity of a discrete candidate solution against physical and numerical detection criteria. Within the DG scheme on the main grid, the discrete solution is represented by piecewise polynomials of degree N. For those troubled cells that need limiting, our new limiter approach recomputes the discrete solution by scattering the DG polynomials at the previous time step onto a set of N_s=2N+1 finite volume subcells per space dimension. A robust but accurate ADER-WENO finite volume scheme then updates the subcell averages of the conservative variables within the detected troubled cells. The choice of N_s=2N+1 subcells is optimal since it allows to match the maximum admissible time step of the finite volume scheme on the subgrid with the maximum admissible time step of the DG scheme on the main grid. We illustrate the performance of the new scheme via the simulation of numerous test cases in two and three space dimensions, using DG schemes of up to tenth order of accuracy in space and time (N=9). The method is also able to run on massively parallel large scale supercomputing infrastructure, which is shown via one 3D test problem that uses 10 billion space-time degrees of freedom per time step.