Smoothness-Increasing Accuracy-Conserving Filters for Discontinuous Galerkin Solutions over Unstructured Triangular Meshes

The discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method has very quickly found utility in such diverse applications as computational solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, acoustics, and electromagnetics. The DG methodology merely requires weak constraints on the fluxes between elements. This feature provides a flexibility which is difficult to match with conventional continuous Galerkin methods. However, allowing discontinuity between element interfaces can in turn be problematic during simulation postprocessing, such as in visualization. Consequently, smoothness-increasing accuracy-conserving (SIAC) filters were proposed in [M. Steffen et al., IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., 14 (2008), pp. 680--692, D. Walfisch et al., J. Sci. Comput., 38 (2009), pp. 164--184] as a means of introducing continuity at element interfaces while maintaining the order of accuracy of the original input DG solution. Although the DG methodology can be applied to arbitrary triangulations, the typical application of SIAC filters has been to DG solutions obtained over translation invariant meshes such as structured quadrilaterals and triangles. As the assumption of any sort of regularity including the translation invariance of the mesh is a hindrance towards making the SIAC filter applicable to real life simulations, we demonstrate in this paper for the first time the behavior and complexity of the computational extension of this filtering technique to fully unstructured tessellations. We consider different types of unstructured triangulations and show that it is indeed possible to get reduced errors and improved smoothness through a proper choice of kernel scaling. These results are promising, as they pave the way towards a more generalized SIAC filtering technique.