Well-Balanced High-Order Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Systems of Balance Laws

Abstract

This work introduces a general strategy to develop well-balanced high-order Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) numerical schemes for systems of balance laws. The essence of our approach is a local projection step that guarantees the exactly well-balanced character of the resulting numerical method for smooth stationary solutions. The strategy can be adapted to some well-known different time marching DG discretisations. Particularly, in this article, Runge–Kutta DG and ADER DG methods are studied. Additionally, a limiting procedure based on a modified WENO approach is described to deal with the spurious oscillations generated in the presence of non-smooth solutions, keeping the well-balanced properties of the scheme intact. The resulting numerical method is then exactly well-balanced and high-order in space and time for smooth solutions. Finally, some numerical results are depicted using different systems of balance laws to show the performance of the introduced numerical strategy.