A general framework for the evaluation of shock-capturing schemes

We introduce a standardized procedure for benchmarking shock-capturing schemes which is intended to go beyond traditional case-by-case analysis, by setting objective metrics for cross-comparison of flow solvers. The main idea is that use of shock-capturing schemes yields both distributed errors associated with propagation of wave-like disturbances in smooth flow regions, and localized errors at shocks where nonlinear numerical mechanisms are most active. Our standardized error evaluation framework relies on previous methods of analysis for the propagation error with associated cost/error mapping, and on novel analysis of the shock-capturing error based on a model scalar problem. Amplitude and phase errors are identified for a number of classical shock-capturing schemes with different order of accuracy. Whereas all schemes are found to be, as expected, first-order accurate at shocks, quantitative differences are found to be significant, and we find that certain schemes in wide use (e.g. high-order WENO schemes) may yield substantial over-amplification of incoming disturbances at shocks. Illustrative calculations are also shown for the 1D Euler equations, which support sufficient generality of the analysis, although nonlinearity suggests caution in straightforward extrapolation to other flow cases

Viscous Shock Capturing in a Time-Explicit Discontinuous Galerkin Method

We present a novel, cell-local shock detector for use with discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods. The output of this detector is a reliably scaled, element-wise smoothness estimate which is suited as a control input to a shock capture mechanism. Using an artificial viscosity in the latter role, we obtain a DG scheme for the numerical solution of nonlinear systems of conservation laws. Building on work by Persson and Peraire, we thoroughly justify the detector's design and analyze its performance on a number of benchmark problems. We further explain the scaling and smoothing steps necessary to turn the output of the detector into a local, artificial viscosity. We close by providing an extensive array of numerical tests of the detector in use.Comment: 26 pages, 21 figure