Stability of Energy Stable Flux Reconstruction for the Diffusion Problem using the Interior Penalty and Bassi and Rebay II Numerical Fluxes

Abstract

Recovering some prominent high-order approaches such as the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) or the spectral difference (SD) methods, the flux reconstruction (FR) approach has been adopted by many individuals in the research community and is now commonly used to solve problems on unstructured grids over complex geometries. This approach relies on the use of correction functions to obtain a differential form for the discrete problem. A class of correction functions, named energy stable flux reconstruction (ESFR) functions, has been proven stable for the linear advection problem. This proof has then been extended for the diffusion equation using the local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) scheme to compute the numerical fluxes. Although the LDG scheme is commonly used, many prefer the interior penalty (IP), as well as the Bassi and Rebay II (BR2) schemes. Similarly to the LDG proof, this article provides a stability analysis for the IP and the BR2 numerical fluxes. In fact, we obtain a theoretical condition on the penalty term to ensure stability. This result is then verified through numerical simulations. To complete this study, a von Neumann analysis is conducted to provide a combination of parameters producing the maximal time step while converging at the correct order. All things considered, this article has for purpose to provide the community with a stability condition while using the IP and the BR2 schemes.