Fully-discrete spatial eigenanalysis of discontinuous spectral element methods: insights into well-resolved and under-resolved vortical flows

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed eigenanalysis of fully-discrete discontinuous spectral element methods, examining how time integration errors influence simulations of vortical flows, especially under-resolved turbulence, and highlighting the complex interaction between spatial and temporal discretisation errors.

Contribution

It extends previous eigenanalysis to include time integration errors and investigates their impact on both linear and nonlinear flow simulations, offering new insights into error prediction.

Findings

Eigenanalysis accurately predicts errors in linear problems.

Time errors are less significant on irregular meshes.

Spatial errors dominate in under-resolved vortical flows.

Abstract

This study presents a comprehensive spatial eigenanalysis of fully-discrete discontinuous spectral element methods, now generalizing previous spatial eigenanalysis that did not include time integration errors. The influence of discrete time integration is discussed in detail for different explicit Runge-Kutta (1st to 4th order accurate) schemes combined with either Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) or Spectral Difference (SD) methods, both here recovered from the Flux Reconstruction (FR) scheme. Selected numerical experiments using the improved SD method by Liang and Jameson [1] are performed to quantify the influence of time integration errors on actual simulations. These involve test cases of varied complexity, from one-dimensional linear advection equation studies to well-resolved and under-resolved inviscid vortical flows. It is shown that, while both well-resolved and under-resolved simulations of linear problems correlate well with the eigenanalysis prediction of time integration errors, the correlation can be much worse for under-resolved nonlinear problems. The effect of mesh regularity is also considered, where time integration errors are found to be, in the case of irregular grids, less pronounced than those of the spatial discretisation. In fact, for the under-resolved vortical flows considered, the predominance of spatial errors made it practically impossible for time integration errors to be distinctly identified. Nevertheless, for well-resolved nonlinear simulations, the effect of time integration errors could still be recognized. This highlights that the interaction between space and time discretisation errors is more complex than otherwise anticipated, contributing to the current understanding about when eigenanalysis can effectively predict the behaviour of numerical errors in practical under-resolved nonlinear problems, including under-resolved turbulence computations.