A New Family of Thermodynamically Compatible Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Continuum Mechanics and Turbulent Shallow Water Flows

Abstract

In this work we propose a new family of high order accurate semi-discrete discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element schemes for the thermodynamically compatible discretization of overdetermined first order hyperbolic systems. In particular, we consider a first order hyperbolic model of turbulent shallow water flows, as well as the unified first order hyperbolic Godunov–Peshkov–Romenski (GPR) model of continuum mechanics, which is able to describe at the same time viscous fluids and nonlinear elastic solids at large deformations. Both PDE systems treated in this paper belong to the class of hyperbolic and thermodynamically compatible systems, since both satisfy an entropy inequality and the total energy conservation can be obtained as a direct consequence of all other governing equations via suitable linear combination with the corresponding thermodynamic dual variables. In this paper, we mimic this process for the first time also at the semi-discrete level at the aid of high order discontinuous Galerkin finite element schemes. For the GPR model we directly discretize the entropy inequality and obtain total energy conservation as a consequence of a suitable discretization of all other evolution equations. For turbulent shallow water flows we directly discretize the nonconservative evolution equations related to the Reynolds stress tensor and obtain total energy conservation again as a result of the thermodynamically compatible discretization. As a consequence, for continuum mechanics the new DG schemes satisfy a cell entropy inequality directly by construction and thanks to the discrete thermodynamic compatibility they are provably nonlinearly stable in the energy norm for both systems under consideration.