The paper investigates the numerical performance of a Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) hydrodynamics implementation when applied to the problem of driven, isothermal supersonic turbulence. DG methods are known to efficiently produce accurate results for smooth problems, but physical discontinuities like shocks can pose challenges.
The authors introduce two key improvements to their DG implementation to handle highly supersonic flows:
A von Neumann-Richtmyer artificial viscosity scheme to prevent the growth of spurious oscillations at shocks. This provides the necessary dissipation to capture shocks accurately.
A projection of the primitive variables (density, velocity, pressure) onto the polynomial basis, rather than using the ratio of conserved variables. This regularizes the extrapolated values at cell interfaces, which can otherwise become unphysically large in the supersonic regime.
With these modifications, the DG scheme is able to retain its accuracy and stability for moderately high Mach number turbulence, compared to standard second-order finite volume schemes. However, the accuracy advantage of DG diminishes in the highly supersonic regime (Mach numbers beyond 10).
The authors also discuss the substantial computational cost of high-order DG, which needs to be weighed against the resulting accuracy gain. For problems containing shocks, they find that using a comparatively low DG order (e.g. 𝑝=2) provides a good compromise.
Overall, the results support the practical applicability of DG schemes for demanding astrophysical problems involving strong shocks and turbulence, such as star formation in the interstellar medium.
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arxiv.org
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