An optimal order interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin discretization of the compressible Navier–Stokes equations

In this article we propose a new symmetric version of the interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for the numerical approximation of the compressible Navier–Stokes equations. Here, particular emphasis is devoted to the construction of an optimal numerical method for the evaluation of certain target functionals of practical interest, such as the lift and drag coefficients of a body immersed in a viscous fluid. With this in mind, the key ingredients in the construction of the method include: (i) an adjoint consistent imposition of the boundary conditions; (ii) an adjoint consistent reformulation of the underlying target functional of practical interest; (iii) design of appropriate interior penalty stabilization terms. Numerical experiments presented within this article clearly indicate the optimality of the proposed method when the error is measured in terms of both the L 2 -norm , as well as for certain target functionals. Computational comparisons with other discontinuous Galerkin schemes proposed in the literature, including the second scheme of Bassi and Rebay, cf. [F. Bassi, S. Rebay, GMRES discontinuous Galerkin solution of the compressible Navier–Stokes equations, in: B. Cockburn, G. Karniadakis, C.-W. Shu (Eds.), Discontinuous Galerkin Methods, Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci. Engrg., vol. 11, Springer, Berlin, 2000, pp. 197–208; F. Bassi, S. Rebay, Numerical evaluation of two discontinuous Galerkin methods for the compressible Navier–Stokes equations, Int. J. Numer. Methods Fluids 40 (2002) 197–207], the standard SIPG method outlined in [R. Hartmann, P. Houston, Symmetric interior penalty DG methods for the compressible Navier–Stokes equations. I: Method formulation, Int. J. Numer. Anal. Model. 3(1) (2006) 1–20], and an NIPG variant of the new scheme will be undertaken.