Discontinuous Galerkin for stiff hyperbolic systems

A Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method is applied to hyperbolic systems that contain stiff relaxation terms. We demonstrate that when the relaxation time is under-resolved, DG is accurate in the sense that the method accurately represents the system's Chapman-Enskog (or ''diffusion'') approximation. Moreover, we demonstrate that a high-resolution, finite-volume method using the same time-integration method as DG is very inaccurate in the diffusion limit. Results for DG are presented for the hyperbolic heat equation, the Broadwell model of gas kinetics, and coupled radiation-hydrodynamics