A subcell-refined entropy-residual-driven limiting strategy for high-order discontinuous Galerkin methods

Abstract

Fine-grained, subcell-level dissipation control is essential for achieving robust high-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) simulations of nonlinear hyperbolic systems in under-resolved regimes while preserving accuracy. This paper proposes a subcell-refined entropy-residual-driven limiting strategy for DG on Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto nodes. The limiter introduces only nearest-neighbor pairwise dissipation within each element, with closed-form coefficients that supply the minimal dissipation required to restore the element entropy inequality. The strategy is a diagonal, locally stable approximation of classical entropy-stable methods, and a generalized subcell framework reveals split-form DG and residual-distribution-based entropy correction schemes as particular choices of the limiting coefficients. For the Euler equations, a physically consistent jump operator separately models thermal and shear entropy production while preserving velocity and pressure equilibrium; a subcell refinement of the Zhang-Shu positivity limiter ensures pointwise positivity. Extensive numerical tests confirm that the scheme maintains optimal high-order accuracy, strictly enforces entropy dissipation, and significantly reduces the difficulty of a posteriori positivity-preserving procedures.