In this article, we give a brief overview on high order accurate shock capturing schemes with the aim of applications in compressible turbulence simulations. The emphasis is on the basic methodology and recent algorithm developments for two classes of high order methods: the weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) and discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods.

In this paper, we investigate a simple limiter using weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) methodology for the Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) methods solving conservation laws, with the goal of obtaining a robust and high order limiting procedure to simultaneously achieve uniform high order accuracy and sharp, non-oscillatory shock transitions. The idea of this limiter is to reconstruct the entire polynomial, instead of reconstructing point values or moments in the classical WENO reconstructions. That is, the reconstruction polynomial on the target cell is a convex combination of polynomials on this cell and its neighboring cells and the nonlinear weights of the convex combination follow the classical WENO procedure. The main advantage of this limiter is its simplicity in implementation, especially for multi-dimensional meshes. Numerical results in one and two dimensions are provided to illustrate the behavior of this procedure.

The gas dynamics equations, coupled with a static gravitational field, admit the hydrostatic balance where the flux produced by the pressure is exactly canceled by the gravitational source term. Many astrophysical problems involve the hydrodynamical evolution in a gravitational field, therefore it is essential to correctly capture the effect of gravitational force in the simulations. Improper treatment of the gravitational force can lead to a solution which either oscillates around the equilibrium, or deviates from the equilibrium after a long time run. In this paper we design high order well-balanced finite difference WENO schemes to this system, which can preserve the hydrostatic balance state exactly and at the same time can maintain genuine high order accuracy. Numerical tests are performed to verify high order accuracy, well-balanced property, and good resolution for smooth and discontinuous solutions. The main purpose of the well-balanced schemes designed in this paper is to well resolve small perturbations of the hydrostatic balance state on coarse meshes. The more difficult issue of convergence towards such hydrostatic balance state from an arbitrary initial condition is not addressed in this paper.

The convergence to steady state solutions of the Euler equations for weighted compact nonlinear schemes (WCNS) [Deng X. and Zhang H. (2000), J. Comput. Phys. 165, 22-44 and Zhang S., Jiang S and Shu C.-W. (2008), J. Comput. Phys. 227, 7294-7321] is studied through numerical tests. Like most other shock capturing schemes, WCNS also suffers from the problem that the residue can not settle down to machine zero for the computation of the steady state solution which contains shock waves but hangs at the truncation error level. In this paper, the techniques studied in [Zhang S. and Shu. C.-W. (2007), J. Sci. Comput. 31, 273-305 and Zhang S., Jiang S and Shu. C.-W. (2011), J. Sci. Comput. 47, 216-238], to improve the convergence to steady state solutions for WENO schemes, are generalized to the WCNS. Detailed numerical studies in one and two dimensional cases are performed. Numerical tests demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques when applied to WCNS. The residue of various order WCNS can settle down to machine zero for typical cases while the small post-shock oscillations can be removed.

We propose second order accurate discontinuous Galerkin (DG) schemes which satisfy a strict maximum principle for general nonlinear convection-diffusion equations on unstructured triangular meshes. Motivated by genuinely high order maximum-principle-satisfying DG schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws, we prove that under suitable time step restriction for forward Euler time stepping, for general nonlinear convection-diffusion equations, the same scaling limiter coupled with second order DG methods preserves the physical bounds indicated by the initial condition while maintaining uniform second order accuracy. Similar to the purely convection cases, the limiters are mass conservative and easy to implement. Strong stability preserving (SSP) high order time discretizations will keep the maximum principle. Following the idea in earlier work, we extend the schemes to two-dimensional convection-diffusion equations on triangular meshes. There are no geometric constraints on the mesh such as angle acuteness. Numerical results including incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are presented to validate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the numerical methods.