Lyapunov exponents and adaptive mesh refinement for high-speed flows using a discontinuous Galerkin scheme

Abstract

This paper proposes two important improvements to shock-capturing strategies using a discontinuous Galerkin scheme, namely, accurate shock identification via finite-time Lyapunov exponent (FTLE) operators and efficient shock treatment through a point-implicit discretization of a PDE-based artificial viscosity technique. The advocated approach is based on the FTLE operator, originally developed in the context of dynamical systems theory to identify certain types of coherent structures in a flow. We propose the application of FTLEs in the detection of shock waves and demonstrate the operator's ability to identify strong and weak shocks equally well. The detection algorithm is coupled with a mesh refinement procedure and applied to transonic and supersonic flows. While the proposed strategy can be used potentially with any numerical method, a high-order discontinuous Galerkin solver is used in this study. In this context, two artificial viscosity approaches are employed to regularize the solution near shocks: an element-wise constant viscosity technique and a PDE-based smooth viscosity model. As the latter approach is more sophisticated and preferable for complex problems, a point-implicit discretization in time is proposed to reduce the extra stiffness introduced by the PDE-based technique, making it more competitive in terms of computational cost.