Multi-element SIAC filter for shock capturing applied to high-order discontinuous Galerkin spectral element methods

Abstract: We build a multi-element variant of the smoothness increasing accuracy conserving (SIAC) shock capturing technique proposed for single element spectral methods by Wissink et al. (B.W. Wissink, G.B. Jacobs, J.K. Ryan, W.S. Don, and E.T.A. van der Weide. Shock regularization with smoothness-increasing accuracy-conserving Dirac-delta polynomial kernels. Journal of Scientific Computing, 77:579--596, 2018). In particular, the baseline scheme of our method is the nodal discontinuous Galerkin spectral element method (DGSEM) for approximating the solution of systems of conservation laws. It is well known that high-order methods generate spurious oscillations near discontinuities which can develop in the solution for nonlinear problems, even when the initial data is smooth. We propose a novel multi-element SIAC filtering technique applied to the DGSEM as a shock capturing method. We design the SIAC filtering such that the numerical scheme remains high-order accurate and that the shock capturing is applied adaptively throughout the domain. The shock capturing method is derived for general systems of conservation laws. We apply the novel SIAC filter to the two-dimensional Euler and ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations to several standard test problems with a variety of boundary conditions.