Hypersonic heat transfer and anisotropic visualization with a higher order discontinuous Galerkin finite element method

Abstract

Higher order discretizations of the Navier-Stokes equations promise greater accuracy than conventional computational aerodynamics methods. In particular, the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method has O(hP+l) design accuracy and allows for subcell resolution of shocks. This work furthers the DG finite element method in two ways. First, it demonstrates the results of DG when used to predict heat transfer to a cylinder in a hypersonic flow. The strong shock is captured with a Laplacian artificial viscosity term. On average, the results are in agreement with an existing hypersonic benchmark. Second, this work improves the visualization of the higher order polynomial solutions generated by DG with an adaptive display algorithm. The new algorithm results in more efficient displays of higher order solutions, including the hypersonic flow solutions generated here.