High order maximum principle preserving discontinuous Galerkin method for convection-diffusion equations

Abstract: In this paper, we propose to apply the parametrized maximum-principle-preserving (MPP) flux limiter in [Xiong et. al., JCP, 2013] to the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for solving the convection-diffusion equations. The feasibility of applying the MPP flux limiters to the DG solution of convection-diffusion problem is based on the fact that the cell averages for the DG solutions are updated in a conservative fashion (by using flux difference) even in the presence of diffusion terms. The main purpose of this paper is to address the difficulty of obtaining higher than second order accuracy while maintaining a discrete maximum principle for the DG method solving convection diffusion equations. We found that the proposed MPP flux limiter can be applied to arbitrarily high order DG method. Numerical evidence is presented to show that the proposed MPP flux limiter method does not adversely affect the desired high order accuracy, nor does it require restrictive time steps. Numerical experiments including incompressible Navier-Stokes equations demonstrate the high order accuracy preserving, the MPP performance, and the robustness of the proposed method.