A Sub-Cell Based Indicator for Troubled Zones in RKDG Schemes and a Novel Class of Hybrid RKDG+HWENO Schemes

Abstract

Runge Kutta Discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) schemes can provide highly accurate solutions for a large class of important scientific problems. Using them for problems with shocks and other discontinuities requires that one has a strategy for detecting the presence of these discontinuities. In order to get past previous limitations in designing a limiter, we realize that the solution in RKDG schemes can carry meaningful sub-structure within a zone that may not need to be limited. To make this sub-structure visible, we take a sub-cell approach to detecting zones with discontinuities, known as troubled zones. A monotonicity preserving (MP) strategy is applied to distinguish between meaningful sub-structure and shocks. The strategy does not indiscriminately clip extrema and is, nevertheless, scale-free and problem-independent. The moments of the troubled zones is corrected using a weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) or Hermite WENO (HWENO) approach. In the course of doing this work it was also realized that the most significant variation in the solution is contained in the solution variables and their first moments. Thus it is shown that the additional moments can be reconstructed using the variables and their first moments, resulting in a very substantial savings in computer memory and without any loss in order of accuracy. We call such schemes hybrid RKDG+HWENO schemes. Explicit, easy to implement formulae have been catalogued for third and fourth order of spatial accuracy. Several stringent test problems have also been presented.