Implicit Positivity-Preserving High-Order Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Conservation Laws

Abstract

Positivity-preserving discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for solving hyperbolic conservation laws have been extensively studied in the last several years, but nearly all the developed schemes are coupled with explicit time discretizations. Explicit discretizations suffer from the constraint for the Courant--Friedrichs--Lewy (CFL) number. This makes explicit methods impractical for problems involving unstructured and extremely varying meshes or long-time simulations. Instead, implicit DG schemes are often popular in practice, especially in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) community. In this paper we develop a high-order positivity-preserving DG method with the backward Euler time discretization for conservation laws. We focus on one spatial dimension. However, the result easily generalizes to multidimensional tensor product meshes and polynomial spaces. This work is based on a generalization of the positivity-preserving limiters in [X. Zhang and C.-W. Shu, J. Comput. Phys., 229 (2010), pp. 3091--312...