Robustness, accuracy and efficiency of the discontinuous Galerkin spectral element method under local mesh refinement in an industrial CFD solver

Abstract

We consider the split-form discontinuos Galerkin spectral element discretization (DGSEM) of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations in the CFD software by ONERA, DLR and Airbus (CODA). We extend this implementation to treat meshes with hanging nodes and empirically study its robustness, accuracy and efficiency in combination with a curvilinear nonconforming grid, for two standard test problems in the context of scale-resolving simulations. Compared to the conforming case, we find that robustness is maintained, that local refinement by means of octree element subdivision is effective at increasing accuracy, and that there exists great potential for efficiency gains provided that an effective adaptation strategy is employed.