Simulation of a viscous compressible flow past a circular cylinder with high-order discontinuous Galerkin methods

Abstract This paper is devoted to the simulation of viscous compressible flows with high-order accurate discontinuous Galerkin methods on bidimensional unstructured meshes. The formulation for the solution of the Navier–Stokes equations is due to Oden et al. [An hp-adaptive discontinuous finite element method for computational fluid dynamics. PhD thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, 1997; J Comput Phys 1998;146:491–519]. It involves a weak imposition of continuity conditions on the state variables and on fluxes across interelement boundaries. It does not make use of any auxiliary variables and then the cost for the implementation is reasonable. The method is coupled with a limiting procedure recently developed by the authors to suppress oscillations near large gradients. The limiter is totally free of problem dependence and maintains the convergence order for errors measured in the L 1 -norm. This paper presents detailed numerical results of a viscous compressible flow past a circular cylinder at a Reynolds number of 100 for the cases of subsonic and supersonic regimes. The proposed simulations suggest that the method is very robust and is able to produce very accurate results on unstructured meshes.