A Face-Upwinded Spectral Element Method

Abstract: We present a new high-order accurate discretisation on unstructured meshes of quadrilateral elements. Our Face Upwinded Spectral Element (FUSE) method uses the same node distribution as a high-order continuous Galerkin (CG) method, but with a particular choice of node locations within each element and an upwinded stencil on the face nodes. This results in a number of benefits, including fewer degrees of freedom and straight-forward integration with CG. We present the derivation of the scheme and the analysis of its properties, in particular showing stability using von Neumann analysis. We show numerical evidence for its accuracy and efficiency on multiple classes of problems including convection-dominated flows, Poisson's equation, and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations.