Three discontinuous Galerkin schemes for the anisotropic heat conduction equation on non-aligned grids

We present and discuss three discontinuous Galerkin (dG) discretizations for the anisotropic heat conduction equation on non-aligned cylindrical grids. Our non-aligned scheme relies on a self-adjoint local dG (LDG) discretization of the elliptic operator. It conserves the energy exactly and converges with arbitrary order. The pollution by numerical perpendicular heat fluxes decreases with superconvergence rates. We compare this scheme with aligned schemes that are based on the flux-coordinate independent approach for the discretization of parallel derivatives. Here, the dG method provides the necessary interpolation. The first aligned discretization can be used in an explicit time-integrator. However, the scheme violates conservation of energy and shows up stagnating convergence rates for very high resolutions. We overcome this partly by using the adjoint of the parallel derivative operator to construct a second self-adjoint aligned scheme. This scheme preserves energy, but reveals unphysical oscillations in the numerical tests, which result in a decreased order of convergence. Both aligned schemes exhibit low numerical heat fluxes into the perpendicular direction and are superior for flute-modes with finite parallel gradients. We build our argumentation on various numerical experiments on all three schemes for a general axisymmetric magnetic field, which is closed by a comparison to the aligned finite difference (FD) schemes of Stegmeir et al. (2014) and Stegmeir et al. (submitted for publication).