Superconvergence properties of an upwind-biased discontinuous Galerkin method

Daniel Frean, Jennifer Ryan

Published 2016-02-20Version 1

In this paper we investigate the superconvergence properties of the discontinuous Galerkin method based on the upwind-biased flux for linear time-dependent hyperbolic equations. We prove that for even-degree polynomials, the method is locally $\mathcal{O}(h^{k+2})$ superconvergent at roots of a linear combination of the left- and right-Radau polynomials. This linear combination depends on the value of $\theta$ used in the flux. For odd-degree polynomials, the scheme is superconvergent provided that a proper global initial interpolation can be defined. We demonstrate numerically that, for decreasing $\theta$, the discretization errors decrease for even polynomials and grow for odd polynomials. We prove that the use of Smoothness-Increasing Accuracy-Conserving (SIAC) filters is still able to draw out the superconvergence information and create a globally smooth and superconvergent solution of $\mathcal{O}(h^{2k+1})$ for linear hyperbolic equations. Lastly, we briefly consider the spectrum of the upwind-biased DG operator and demonstrate that the price paid for the introduction of the parameter $\theta$ is limited to a contribution to the constant attached to the post-processed error term.