Optimal transport for mesh adaptivity and shock capturing of compressible flows

We present an optimal transport approach for mesh adaptivity and shock capturing of compressible flows. Shock capturing is based on a viscosity regularization of the governing equations by introducing an artificial viscosity field as solution of the modified Helmholtz equation. Mesh adaptation is based on the optimal transport theory by formulating a mesh mapping as solution of Monge-Ampère equation. The marriage of optimal transport and viscosity regularization for compressible flows leads to a coupled system of the compressible Euler/Navier-Stokes equations, the Helmholtz equation, and the Monge-Ampère equation. We propose an iterative procedure to solve the coupled system in a sequential fashion using homotopy continuation to minimize the amount of artificial viscosity while enforcing positivity-preserving and smoothness constraints on the numerical solution. We explore various mesh monitor functions for computing r-adaptive meshes in order to reduce the amount of artificial dissipation and improve the accuracy of the numerical solution. The hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method is used for the spatial discretization of the governing equations to obtain high-order accurate solutions. Extensive numerical results are presented to demonstrate the optimal transport approach on transonic, supersonic, hypersonic flows in two dimensions. The approach is found to yield accurate, sharp yet smooth solutions within a few mesh adaptation iterations. •An optimal transport approach is developed for shock capturing and mesh adaptation.•Minimize artificial viscosity subject to physicality and smoothness constraints.•Adapt meshes to capture shocks and resolve boundary layers.•Extensive results are presented for transonic, supersonic and hypersonic flows.