A Posteriori Subcell Limiting of the Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method for Hyperbolic Conservation Laws

The purpose of this work is to propose a novel a posteriori finite volume subcell limiter technique for the Discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for nonlinear systems of hyperbolic conservation laws in multiple space dimensions that works well for arbitrary high order of accuracy in space and time and that does not destroy the natural subcell resolution properties of the DG method. High order time discretization is achieved via a one-step ADER approach that uses a local space-time discontinuous Galerkin predictor method to evolve the data locally in time within each cell. Our new limiting strategy is based on the so-called MOOD paradigm, which a posteriori verifies the validity of a discrete candidate solution against physical and numerical detection criteria after each time step. Here, we employ a relaxed discrete maximum principle in the sense of piecewise polynomials and the positivity of the numerical solution as detection criteria. Within the DG scheme on the main grid, the discrete solution is represented by piecewise polynomials of degree N. For those troubled cells that need limiting, our new limiter approach recomputes the discrete solution by scattering the DG polynomials at the previous time step onto a set of Ns = 2N + 1 finite volume subcells per space dimension. A robust but accurate ADER-WENO finite volume scheme then updates the subcell averages of the conservativ