A Moving Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method with Interface Conservation Enforcement for Compressible Flows

Abstract: A moving discontinuous Galerkin finite element method with interface conservation enforcement (MDG+ICE) is developed for solving the compressible Euler equations. The MDG+ICE method is based on the space-time DG formulation, where both flow field and grid geometry are considered as independent variables and the conservation laws are enforced both on discrete elements and element interfaces. The element conservation laws are solved in the standard discontinuous solution space to determine conservative quantities, while the interface conservation is enforced using a variational formulation in a continuous space to determine discrete grid geometry. The resulting over-determined system of nonlinear equations arising from the MDG+ICE formulation can then be solved in a least-squares sense, leading to an unconstrained nonlinear least-squares problem that is regularized and solved by Levenberg-Marquardt method. A number of numerical experiments for compressible flows are conducted to assess the accuracy and robustness of the MDG+ICE method. Numerical results obtained indicate that the MDG+ICE method is able to implicitly detect and track all types of discontinuities via interface conservation enforcement and satisfy the conservation law on both elements and interfaces via grid movement and grid management, demonstrating that an exponential rate of convergence for Sod and Lax-Harden shock tube problems can be achieved and highly accurate solutions without overheating to both double-rarefaction wave and Noh problems can be obtained.