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Section: Research Program

Efficient time integration strategies

The use of unstructured meshes (based on triangles in two space dimensions and tetrahedra in three space dimensions) is an important feature of the DGTD methods developed in the team which can thus easily deal with complex geometries and heterogeneous propagation media. Moreover, DG discretization methods are naturally adapted to local, conforming as well as non-conforming, refinement of the underlying mesh. Most of the existing DGTD methods rely on explicit time integration schemes and lead to block diagonal mass matrices which is often recognized as one of the main advantages with regards to continuous finite element methods. However, explicit DGTD methods are also constrained by a stability condition that can be very restrictive on highly refined meshes and when the local approximation relies on high order polynomial interpolation. There are basically three strategies that can be considered to cure this computational efficiency problem. The first approach is to use an unconditionally stable implicit time integration scheme to overcome the restrictive constraint on the time step for locally refined meshes. In a second approach, a local time stepping strategy is combined with an explicit time integration scheme. In the third approach, the time step size restriction is overcome by using a hybrid explicit-implicit procedure. In this case, one blends a time implicit and a time explicit schemes where only the solution variables defined on the smallest elements are treated implicitly. The first and third options are considered in the team in the framework of DG [4]-[20]-[19] and HDG discretization methods.