An interface treating technique for compressible multi-medium flow with Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method

The high-order accurate Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) method is applied to the simulation of compressible multi-medium flow, generalizing the interface treating method given in Chertock et al. (2008) [9]. In mixed cells, where the interface is located, Riemann problems are solved to define the states on both sides of the interface. The input states to the Riemann problem are obtained by extrapolation to the cell boundary from solution polynomials in the neighbors of the mixed cell. The level set equation is solved by using a high-order accurate RKDG method for Hamilton–Jacobi equations, resulting in a unified DG solver for the coupled problem. The method is conservative if we include the states in the mixed cells, which are however not used in the updating of the numerical solution in other cells. The states in the mixed cells are plotted to better evaluate the conservation errors, manifested by overshoots/undershoots when compared with states in neighboring cells. These overshoots/undershoots in mixed cells are problem dependent and change with time. Numerical examples show that the results of our scheme compare well with other methods for one and two-dimensional problems. In particular, the algorithm can capture well complex flow features of the one-dimensional shock entropy wave interaction problem and two-dimensional shock–bubble interaction problem.