Invariant-domain-preserving limiting with Adaptive Mesh Refinement for Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto Discontinuous Galerkin Spectral Element Methods

Abstract: We present an invariant-domain-preserving (IDP) treatment of nonconforming interfaces for Legendre--Gauss--Lobatto Discontinuous Galerkin Spectral Element Methods (LGL-DGSEM) with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) on Cartesian meshes. The proposed methodology extends recently developed convex limiting and graph-viscosity frameworks for DGSEM to meshes containing hanging nodes. Starting from a conservative mortar formulation, we derive low-order interface fluxes that satisfy the requirements of invariant-domain-preserving discretizations. To avoid the excessive diffusion associated with fully connected mortar couplings, a sparsification strategy based on LGL subcell characteristic functions is introduced, yielding compact interface stencils. The resulting mortar fluxes remain conservative, reduce to the standard conforming formulation on matching interfaces, and naturally fit into graph-viscosity-based low-order schemes used for convex limiting. The proposed construction provides the missing ingredient required to combine high-order DGSEM discretizations, invariant-domain-preserving limiting, and adaptive mesh refinement within a unified framework for nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws. We provide numerical verifications of the properties of the proposed scheme and run challenging simulations that require positivity limiting and shock-capturing.