High-order discontinuous Galerkin method for time-domain electromagnetics on non-conforming hybrid meshes

We present a high-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for solving the time-dependent Maxwell equations on non-conforming hybrid meshes. The hybrid mesh combines unstructured tetrahedra for the discretization of irregularly shaped objects with a hexahedral mesh for the rest of the computational domain. The transition between tetrahedra and hexahedra is completely non-conform, that is, no pyramidal or prismatic elements are introduced to link these elements. Within each mesh element, the electromagnetic field components are approximated by a arbitrary order nodal polynomial and a centered approximation is used for the evaluation of numerical fluxes at inter-element boundaries. The time integration of the associated semi-discrete equations is achieved by a fourth-order leap-frog scheme. The method is described and discussed, including algorithm formulation, stability, and practical implementation issues such as the hybrid mesh generation and the computation of flux matrices with cubature rules. We illustrate the performance of the proposed method on several two-and three-dimensional examples involving comparisons with DG methods on single element-type meshes. The results show that the use of non-conforming hybrid meshes in DG methods allows for a notable reduction in computing time without sacrificing accuracy. (C) 2014 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.