A Hermite WENO reconstruction-based discontinuous Galerkin method for the Euler equations on tetrahedral grids

A Hermite WENO reconstruction-based discontinuous Galerkin method RDG(P1P2), designed not only to enhance the accuracy of discontinuous Galerkin method but also to ensure linear stability of the RDG method, is presented for solving the compressible Euler equations on tetrahedral grids. In this RDG(P1P2) method, a quadratic polynomial solution (P-2) is first reconstructed using a least-squares method from the underlying linear polynomial (P-1) discontinuous Galerkin solution. By taking advantage of handily available and yet invaluable information, namely the derivatives in the DG formulation, the stencils used in the reconstruction involve only von Neumann neighborhood (adjacent face-neighboring cells) and thus are compact and consistent with the underlying DG method. The final quadratic polynomial solution is then obtained using a WENO reconstruction, which is necessary to ensure linear stability of the RDG method. The developed RDG method is used to compute a variety of flow problems on tetrahedral meshes to demonstrate its accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and versatility. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the developed RDG(P1P2) method is able to maintain the linear stability, achieve the designed third-order of accuracy: one order accuracy higher than the underlying DG method without significant increase in computing costs and storage requirements. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.