An immersed discontinuous Galerkin method for compressible Navier‐Stokes equations on unstructured meshes

Abstract

Summary We introduce an immersed high‐order discontinuous Galerkin method for solving the compressible Navier‐Stokes equations on non–boundary‐fitted meshes. The flow equations are discretised with a mixed discontinuous Galerkin formulation and are advanced in time with an explicit time marching scheme. The discretisation meshes may contain simplicial (triangular or tetrahedral) elements of different sizes and need not be structured. On the discretisation mesh, the fluid domain boundary is represented with an implicit signed distance function. The cut‐elements partially covered by the solid domain are integrated after tessellation with the marching triangle or tetrahedra algorithms. Two alternative techniques are introduced to overcome the excessive stable time step restrictions imposed by cut‐elements. In the first approach, the cut‐basis functions are replaced with the extrapolated basis functions from the nearest largest element. In the second approach, the cut‐basis functions are simply scaled proportionally to the fraction of the cut‐element covered by the solid. To achieve high‐order accuracy, additional nodes are introduced on the element faces abutting the solid boundary. Subsequently, the faces are curved by projecting the introduced nodes to the boundary. The proposed approach is verified and validated with several two‐ and three‐dimensional subsonic and hypersonic low Reynolds number flow applications, including the flow over a cylinder, a space capsule, and an aerospace vehicle.