A sparse and high-order accurate line-based discontinuous Galerkin method for unstructured meshes

We present a new line-based discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretization scheme for first- and second-order systems of partial differential equations. The scheme is based on fully unstructured meshes of quadrilateral or hexahedral elements, and it is closely related to the standard nodal DG scheme as well as several of its variants such as the collocation-based DG spectral element method (DGSEM) or the spectral difference (SD) method. However, our motivation is to maximize the sparsity of the Jacobian matrices, since this directly translates into higher performance in particular for implicit solvers, while maintaining many of the good properties of the DG scheme. To achieve this, our scheme is based on applying one-dimensional DG solvers along each coordinate direction in a reference element. This reduces the number of connectivities drastically, since the scheme only connects each node to a line of nodes along each direction, as opposed to the standard DG method which connects all nodes inside the element and many nodes in the neighboring ones. The resulting scheme is similar to a collocation scheme, but it uses fully consistent integration along each 1-D coordinate direction which results in different properties for nonlinear problems and curved elements. Also, the scheme uses solution points along each element face, which further reduces the number of connections with the neighboring elements. Second-order terms are handled by an LDG-type approach, with an upwind/downwind flux function based on a switch function at each element face. We demonstrate the accuracy of the method and compare it to the standard nodal DG method for problems including Poisson’s equation, Euler’s equations of gas dynamics, and both the steady-state and the transient compressible Navier–Stokes equations. We also show how to integrate the Navier–Stokes equations using implicit schemes and Newton–Krylov solvers, without impairing the high sparsity of the matrices.