Discontinuous Galerkin methods for hypersonic flows

In recent years, high-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods have emerged as an attractive approach for numerical simulations of compressible flows. This paper presents an overview of the recent development of DG methods for compressible flows with particular focus on hypersonic flows. First, we survey state-of-the-art DG methods for computational fluid dynamics. Next, we discuss both matrix-based and matrix-free iterative methods for the solution of discrete systems stemming from the spatial DG discretizations of the compressible Navier–Stokes equations. We then describe various shock capturing methods to deal with strong shock waves in hypersonic flows. We discuss adaptivity techniques to refine high-order meshes, and synthetic boundary conditions to simulate free-stream disturbances in hypersonic boundary layers. We present a few examples to demonstrate the ability of high-order DG methods to provide accurate solutions of hypersonic laminar flows. Furthermore, we present direct numerical simulations of hypersonic transitional flow past a flared cone at Reynolds number 10.8×10⁶, and hypersonic transitional shock wave boundary layer interaction flow over a flat plate at Reynolds number 3.97×10⁶. These simulations run entirely on hundreds of graphics processing units (GPUs) and demonstrate the ability of DG methods to directly resolve hypersonic transitional flows, even at high Reynolds numbers, without relying on transition or turbulence models. We end the paper by offering our perspectives on error estimation, turbulence modeling, and real gas effects in hypersonic flows.