Jump penalty stabilisation techniques for under-resolved turbulence in discontinuous Galerkin schemes

Abstract: Jump penalty stabilisation techniques have been recently proposed for continuous and discontinuous high order Galerkin schemes [1,2,3]. The stabilisation relies on the gradient or solution discontinuity at element interfaces to incorporate localised numerical diffusion in the numerical scheme. This diffusion acts as an implicit subgrid model and stablises under-resolved turbulent simulations. This paper investigates the effect of jump penalty stabilisation methods (penalising gradient or solution) for stabilisation and improvement of high-order discontinuous Galerkin schemes in turbulent regime. We analyse these schemes using an eigensolution analysis, a 1D non-linear Burgers equation (mimicking a turbulent cascade) and 3D turbulent Navier-Stokes simulations (Taylor-Green Vortex problem). We show that the two jump penalty stabilisation techniques can stabilise under-resolved simulations thanks to the improved dispersion-dissipation characteristics (when compared to non-penalised schemes) and provide accurate results for turbulent flows. The numerical results indicate that the proposed jump penalty stabilise under-resolved simulations and improve the simulations, when compared to the original unpenalised scheme and to classic explicit subgrid models (Smagorisnky and Vreman).