A nonlinear filter for high order discontinuous Galerkin discretizations with discontinuity resolution within the cell

The nonlinear filter introduced by Yee et al. (1999) [27] and extensively used in the development of low dissipative well-balanced high order accurate finite-difference schemes is adapted to the finite element context of discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretizations. The filter operator is constructed in the canonical computational domain for the standard cubical element where it is applied to the computed conservative variables in a direction per direction basis. Filtering becomes possible for all element types in unstructured meshes using collapsed coordinate transformations. The performance of the proposed nonlinear filter for DG discretizations is demonstrated and evaluated for different orders of expansions for one-dimensional and multidimensional problems with exact solutions. It is shown that for higher order discretizations discontinuity resolution within the cell is achieved and the design order of accuracy is preserved. The filter is applied for a number of standard inviscid flow test problems including strong shocks interactions to demonstrate that the proposed dissipative mechanism for DG discretizations yields superior results compared to the results obtained with the total variation bounded (TVB) limiter and high-order hierarchical limiting. The proposed approach is suitable for p-adaptivity in order to locally enhance resolution of three-dimensional flow simulations that include discontinuities and complex flow features.