An adaptive pseudospectral method for discontinuous problems

The accuracy of adaptively chosen, mapped polynomial approximations is studied for functions with steep gradients or discontinuities. It is shown that, for steep gradient functions, one can obtain spectral accuracy in the original coordinate system by using polynomial approximations in a transformed coordinate system with substantially fewer collocation points than are necessary using polynomial expansion directly in the original, physical, coordinate system. It is also shown that one can avoid the usual Gibbs oscillation associated with steep gradient solutions of hyperbolic pde's by approximation in suitably chosen coordinate systems. Continuous, high gradient solutions are computed with spectral accuracy (as measured in the physical coordinate system). Discontinuous solutions associated with nonlinear hyperbolic equations can be accurately computed by using an artificial viscosity chosen to smooth out the solution in the mapped, computational domain. Thus, shocks can be effectively resolved on a scale that is subgrid to the resolution available with collocation only in the physical domain. Examples with Fourier and Chebyshev collocation are given

On the convergence of a shock capturing discontinuous Galerkin method for nonlinear hyperbolic systems of conservation laws

In this paper, we present a shock capturing discontinuous Galerkin (SC-DG) method for nonlinear systems of conservation laws in several space dimensions and analyze its stability and convergence. The scheme is realized as a space-time formulation in terms of entropy variables using an entropy stable numerical flux. While being similar to the method proposed in [14], our approach is new in that we do not use streamline diffusion (SD) stabilization. It is proved that an artificial-viscosity-based nonlinear shock capturing mechanism is sufficient to ensure both entropy stability and entropy consistency, and consequently we establish convergence to an entropy measure-valued (emv) solution. The result is valid for general systems and arbitrary order discontinuous Galerkin method.Comment: Comments: Affiliations added Comments: Numerical results added, shortened proo