We present a novel cell-centered direct Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE)
finite volume scheme on unstructured triangular meshes that is high order
accurate in space and time and that also allows for time-accurate local time
stepping (LTS). The new scheme uses the following basic ingredients: a high
order WENO reconstruction in space on unstructured meshes, an element-local
high-order accurate space-time Galerkin predictor that performs the time
evolution of the reconstructed polynomials within each element, the computation
of numerical ALE fluxes at the moving element interfaces through approximate
Riemann solvers, and a one-step finite volume scheme for the time update which
is directly based on the integral form of the conservation equations in
space-time. The inclusion of the LTS algorithm requires a number of crucial
extensions, such as a proper scheduling criterion for the time update of each
element and for each node; a virtual projection of the elements contained in
the reconstruction stencils of the element that has to perform the WENO
reconstruction; and the proper computation of the fluxes through the space-time
boundary surfaces that will inevitably contain hanging nodes in time due to the
LTS algorithm. We have validated our new unstructured Lagrangian LTS approach
over a wide sample of test cases solving the Euler equations of compressible
gasdynamics in two space dimensions, including shock tube problems, cylindrical
explosion problems, as well as specific tests typically adopted in Lagrangian
calculations, such as the Kidder and the Saltzman problem. When compared to the
traditional global time stepping (GTS) method, the newly proposed LTS algorithm
allows to reduce the number of element updates in a given simulation by a
factor that may depend on the complexity of the dynamics, but which can be as
large as 4.7.Comment: 31 pages, 13 figure
