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Section: Research Program

High order discretizations on moving adaptive meshes

We will work on both the improvement of high order mesh generation and adaptation techniques, and the construction of more efficient, adaptive high order discretisation methods.

Concerning curved mesh generation, we will focus on two points. First propose a robust and automatic method to generate curved simplicial meshes for realistic geometries. The untangling algorithm we plan to develop is a hybrid technique that gathers a local mesh optimization applied on the surface of the domain and a linear elasticity analogy applied in its volume. Second we plan to extend the method proposed in [47] to hybrid meshes (prism/tetra).

For time dependent adaptation we will try to exploit as much as possible the use of $r-$adaptation techniques based on the solution of some PDE system for the mesh. We will work on enhancing the results of [3] by developing more robust nonlinear variants allowing to embed rapidly moving objects. For this the use of non-linear mesh PDEs (cf e.g. [106], [112], [61]), combined with Bezier type approximations for the mesh displacements to accommodate high order curved meshes [47], and with improved algorithms to discretize accurately and fast the elliptic equations involved. For this we will explore different type of relaxation methods, including those proposed in [94], [99], [98] allowing to re-use high order discretizations techniques already used for the flow variables. All these modelling approaches for the mesh movement are based on some minimization argument, and do not allow easily to take into account explicitly properties such as e.g. the positivity of nodal volumes. An effort will be made to try to embed these properties, as well as to improve the control on the local mesh sizes obtained. Developments made in numerical methods for Lagrangian hydrodynamics and compressible materials may be a possible path for these objectives (see e.g. [72], [118], [117] and references therein). We will stretch the use of these techniques as much as we can, and couple them with remeshing algorithms based on local modifications plus conservative, high order, and monotone ALE (or other) remaps (cf. [48], [81], [119], [70] and references therein).

The development of high order schemes for the discretization of the PDE will be a major part of our activity. We will work from the start in an Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian setting, so that mesh movement will be easily accommodated, and investigate the following main points:

• the ALE formulation is well adapted both to handle moving meshes, and to provide conservative, high order, and monotone remaps between different meshes. We want to address the issue of cost-accuracy of adaptive mesh computations by exploring different degrees of coupling between the flow and the mesh PDEs. Initial experience has indicated that a clever coupling may lead to a considerable CPU time reduction for a given resolution [3]. This balance is certainly dependent on the nature of the PDEs, on the accuracy level sought, on the cost of the scheme, and on the time stepping technique. All these elements will be taken into account to try to provide the most efficient formulation ;

• the conservation of volume, and the subsequent preservation of constant mass-momentum-energy states on deforming domains is one of the most primordial elements of Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian formulations. For complex PDEs as the ones considered here, of especially for some applications, there may be a competition between the conservation of e.g. mass, an the conservation of other constant states, as important as mass. This is typically the case for free surface flows, in which mass preservation is in competitions with the preservation of constant free surface levels [3]. Similar problems may arise in other applications. Possible solutions to this competition may come from super-approximation (use of higher order polynomials) of some of the data allowing to reduce (e.g. bathymetry) the error in the preservation of one of the competing quantities. This is similar to what is done in super-parametric approximations of the boundaries of an object immersed in the flow, except that in our case the data may enter the PDE explicitly and not only through the boundary conditions. Several efficient solutions for this issue will be investigated to obtain fully conservative moving mesh approaches:

• an issue related to the previous one is the accurate treatment of wall boundaries. It is known that even for standard lower order (second) methods, a higher order, curved, approximation of the boundaries may be beneficial. This, however, may become difficult when considering moving objects, as in the case e.g. of the study of the impact of ice debris in the flow. To alleviate this issue, we plan to follow on with our initial work on the combined use of immersed boundaries techniques with high order, anisotropic (curved) mesh adaptation. In particular, we will develop combined approaches involving high order hybrid meshes on fixed boundaries with the use of penalization techniques and immersed boundaries for moving objects. We plan to study the accuracy obtainable across discontinuous functions with $r-$adaptive techniques, and otherwise use whenever necessary anisotropic meshes to be able to provide a simplified high order description of the wall boundary (cf. [90]). The use of penalization will also provide a natural setting to compute immediate approximations of the forces on the immersed body [97], [100]. An effort will be also made on improving the accuracy of these techniques using e.g. higher order approaches, either based on generalizations of classical splitting methods [82], or on some iterative Defect Correction method (see e.g. [63]) ;

• the proper treatment of different physics may be addressed by using mixed/hybrid schemes in which different variables/equations are approximated using a different polynomial expansion. A typical example is our work on the discretization of highly non-linear wave models [77] in which we have shown how to use a standard continuous Galerkin method for the elliptic equation/variable representative of the dispersive effects, while the underlying hyperbolic system is evolved using a (discontinuous) third order finite volume method. This technique will be generalized to other classes of discontinuous methods, and similar ideas will be used in other context to provide a flexible approximation. Such mathods have clear advantages in multiphase flows but not only. A typical example where such mixed methods are beneficial are flows involving different species and tracer equations, which are typically better treated with a discontinuous approximation. Another example is the use of this mixed approximation to describe the topography with a high order continuous polynomial even in discontinuous method. This allows to greatly simplify the numerical treatment of the bathymetric source terms ;

• the enhancement of stabilized methods based on some continuous finite element approximation will remain a main topic. We will further pursue the study on the construction of simplified stabilization operators which do not involve any contributions to the mass matrix. We will in particular generalize our initial results to higher order spatial approximations using cubature points, or Bezier polynomials, or also hierarchical approximations. This will also be combined with time dependent variants of the reconstruction techniques initially proposed by D. Caraeni [62], allowing to have a more flexible approach similar to the so-called ${\text{P}}^{\text{n}}{\text{P}}^{\text{m}}$ method [75], [111]. How to localize these enhancements, and to efficiently perform local reconstructions/enrichment, as well as $p-$adaptation, and handling hanging nodes will also be a main line of work. A clever combination of hierarchical enrichment of the polynomials, with a constrained approximation will be investigated. All these developments will be combined with the shock capturing/positivity preserving construction we developed in the past. Other discontinuity resolving techniques will be investigated as well, such as face limiting techniques as those partially studied in [79] ;

• time stepping is an important issue, especially in presence of local mesh adaptation. The techniques we use will force us to investigate local and multilevel techniques. We will study the possibility constructing semi-implicit methods combining extrapolation techniques with space-time variational approaches. Other techniques will be considered, as multi-stage type methods obtained using Defect-Correction, Multi-step Runge-Kutta methods [59], as well as spatial partitioning techniques [87]. A major challenge will be to be able to guarantee sufficient locality to the time integration method to allow to efficiently treat highly refined meshes, especially for viscous reactive flows. Another challenge will be to embed these methods in the stabilized methods we will develop.