A reconstructed discontinuous Galerkin method for magnetohydrodynamics on arbitrary grids

A reconstructed discontinuous Galerkin (rDG) method, designed not only to enhance the accuracy of DG methods but also to ensure the nonlinear stability of the rDG method, is developed for solving the Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations on arbitrary grids. In this rDG(P1P2) method, a quadratic polynomial solution (P2) is first obtained using a Hermite Weighted Essentially Non-oscillatory (WENO) reconstruction from the underlying linear polynomial (P1) discontinuous Galerkin solution to ensure linear stability of the rDG method and to improves efficiency of the underlying DG method. By taking advantage of handily available and yet invaluable information, namely the first derivatives in the DG formulation, the stencils used in reconstruction involve only Von Neumann neighborhood (adjacent face-neighboring cells) and thus are compact. The first derivatives of the quadratic polynomial solution are then reconstructed using a WENO reconstruction in order to eliminate spurious oscillations in the vicinity of strong discontinuities, thus ensuring the nonlinear stability of the rDG method. The HLLD Riemann solver introduced in the literature for one-dimensional MHD problems is adopted in normal direction to compute numerical fluxes. The divergence free constraint is satisfied using the Locally Divergence Free (LDF) approach. The developed rDG method is used to compute a variety of 2D and 3D MHD problems on arbitrary grids to demonstrate its accuracy, robustness, and non-oscillatory property. Our numerical experiments indicate that the rDG(P1P2) method is able to capture shock waves sharply essentially without any spurious oscillations, and achieve the designed third-order of accuracy: one order accuracy higher than the underlying DG method.