Shock capturing with PDE-based artificial viscosity for an adaptive, higher-order discontinuous Galerkin finite element method

Abstract

The accurate simulation of supersonic and hypersonic flows is well suited to higher-order (p > 1), adaptive computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Since these cases involve flow velocities greater than the speed of sound, an appropriate shock capturing for higher-order, adaptive methods is necessary. Artificial viscosity can be combined with a higher-order discontinuous Galerkin finite element discretization to resolve a shock layer within a single cell. However, when a nonsmooth artificial viscosity model is employed with an otherwise higher-order approximation, element-to-element variations induce oscillations in state gradients and pollute the downstream flow. To alleviate these difficulties, this work proposes a new, higher-order, state based artificial viscosity with an associated governing partial differential equation (PDE). In the governing PDE, the shock sensor acts as a forcing term, driving the artificial viscosity to a non-zero value where it is necessary. The decay rate of the higher-order solution modes and edge-based jumps are both shown to be reliable shock indicators. This new approach leads to a smooth, higher-order representation of the artificial viscosity that evolves in time with the solution. For applications involving the Navier-Stokes equations, an artificial dissipation operator that preserves total enthalpy is introduced. The combination of higher-order, PDE-based artificial viscosity and enthalpy-preserving dissipation operator is shown to overcome the disadvantages of the non-smooth artificial viscosity. The PDE-based artificial viscosity can be used in conjunction with an automated grid adaptation framework that minimizes the error of an output functional. Higher-order solutions are shown to reach strict engineering tolerances with fewer degrees of freedom.

(cont.) The benefit in computational efficiency for higher-order solutions is less dramatic in the vicinity of the shock where errors scale with O(h/p). This includes the near-field pressure signals necessary for sonic boom prediction. When applied to heat transfer prediction on unstructured meshes in hypersonic flows, the PDE-based artificial viscosity is less susceptible to errors introduced by poor shock-grid alignment. Surface heating can also drive the output-based grid adaptation framework to arrive at the same heat transfer distribution as a well-designed structured mesh.