For a Lagrangian scheme solving the compressible Euler equations in cylindrical coordinates, two important issues are whether the scheme can maintain spherical symmetry (symmetry-preserving) and whether the scheme can maintain positivity of density and internal energy (positivity-preserving). While there were previous results in the literature either for symmetry-preserving in the cylindrical coordinates or for positivity-preserving in cartesian coordinates, the design of a Lagrangian scheme in cylindrical coordinates, which is high order in one-dimension and second order in two-dimensions, and can maintain both spherical symmetry-preservation and positivity-preservation simultaneously, is challenging. In this paper we design such a Lagrangian scheme and provide numerical results to demonstrate its good behavior.

A new class of high order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes [J. Comput. Phys., 318 (2016), 110-121] is applied to solve Euler equations with steady state solutions. It is known that the classical WENO schemes [J. Comput. Phys., 126 (1996), 202-228] might suffer from slight post-shock oscillations. Even though such post-shock oscillations are small enough in magnitude and do not visually affect the essentially non-oscillatory property, they are truly responsible for the residue to hang at a truncation error level instead of converging to machine zero. With the application of this new class of WENO schemes, such slight post-shock oscillations are essentially removed and the residue can settle down to machine zero in steady state simulations. This new class of WENO schemes uses a convex combination of a quartic polynomial with two linear polynomials on unequal size spatial stencils in one dimension and is extended to two dimensions in a dimension-by-dimension fashion. By doing so, such WENO schemes use the same information as the classical WENO schemes in [J. Comput. Phys., 126 (1996), 202-228] and yield the same formal order of accuracy in smooth regions, yet they could converge to steady state solutions with very tiny residue close to machine zero for our extensive list of test problems including shocks, contact discontinuities, rarefaction waves or their interactions, and with these complex waves passing through the boundaries of the computational domain.

In this article, we present a second-order in time implicit-explicit (IMEX) local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for computing the Cahn-Hilliard equation, which describes the phase separation phenomenon. It is well-known that the Cahn-Hilliard equation has a nonlinear stability property, i.e., the free-energy functional decreases with respect to time. The discretized Cahn-Hilliard system modeled by the IMEX LDG method can inherit the nonlinear stability of the continuous model. We apply a stabilization technique and prove unconditional energy stability of our scheme. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the analysis. Computational efficiency can be significantly enhanced by using this IMEX LDG method with a large time step.

We introduce a new troubled-cell indicator for the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for solving hyperbolic conservation laws. This indicator can be defined on unstructured meshes for high order DG methods and depends only on data from the target cell and its immediate neighbors. It is able to identify shocks without PDE sensitive parameters to tune. Extensive one- and two-dimensional simulations on the hyperbolic systems of Euler equations indicate the good performance of this new troubled-cell indicator coupled with a simple minmod-type TVD limiter for the Runge-Kutta DG (RKDG) methods.

It is well known that semi-discrete high order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods satisfy cell entropy inequalities for the square entropy for both scalar conservation laws (\RefOne{Jiang and Shu (1994)} \cite{jiang1994cell}) and symmetric hyperbolic systems (\RefOne{Hou and Liu (2007)} \cite{hou2007solutions}), in any space dimension and for any triangulations. However, this property holds only for the square entropy and the integrations in the DG methods must be exact. It is significantly more difficult to design DG methods to satisfy entropy inequalities for a non-square convex entropy, and / or when the integration is approximated by a numerical quadrature. In this paper, we develop a unified framework for designing high order DG methods which will satisfy entropy inequalities for any given single convex entropy, through suitable numerical quadrature which is specific to this given entropy. Our framework applies from one-dimensional scalar cases all the way to multi-dimensional systems of conservation laws. For the one-dimensional case, our numerical quadrature is based on the methodology established in \RefOne{Carpenter et al (2014)} \cite{carpenter2014entropy} and \RefOne{Gassner (2013)} \cite{gassner2013skew}. The main ingredients are summation-by-parts (SBP) operators derived from Legendre Gauss-Lobatto quadrature, the \RefThree{entropy conservative flux} within elements, and the entropy stable flux at element interfaces. We then generalize the scheme to two-dimensional triangular meshes by constructing SBP operators on triangles based on a special quadrature rule. A local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) type treatment is also incorporated to achieve the generalization to convection-diffusion equations. Extensive numerical experiments are performed to validate the accuracy and shock capturing efficacy of these entropy stable DG methods.