A stable interface element scheme for the p-adaptive lifting collocation penalty formulation

This paper presents a procedure for adaptive polynomial refinement in the context of the lifting collocation penalty (LCP) formulation. The LCP scheme is a high-order unstructured discretization method unifying the discontinuous Galerkin, spectral volume, and spectral difference schemes in single differential formulation. Due to the differential nature of the scheme, the treatment of inter-cell fluxes for spatially varying polynomial approximations is not straightforward. Specially designed elements are proposed to tackle non-conforming polynomial approximations. These elements are constructed such that a conforming interface between polynomial approximations of different degrees is recovered. The stability and conservation properties of the scheme are analyzed and various inviscid compressible flow calculations are performed to demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.