Energy stable flux reconstruction schemes for advection–diffusion problems on triangles

The Flux Reconstruction (FR) approach unifies several well-known high-order schemes for unstructured grids, including a collocation-based nodal discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method and all types of Spectral Difference (SD) methods, at least for linear problems. The FR approach also allows for the formulation of new families of schemes. Of particular interest are the energy stable FR schemes, also referred to as the Vincent–Castonguay–Jameson–Huynh (VCJH) schemes, which are an infinite family of high-order schemes parameterized by a single scalar. VCJH schemes are of practical importance because they provide a stable formulation on triangular elements which are often required for numerical simulations over complex geometries. In particular, VCJH schemes are provably stable for linear advection problems on triangles, and include the collocation-based nodal DG scheme on triangles as a special case. Furthermore, certain VCJH schemes have Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy (CFL) limits which are approximately twice those of the collocation-based nodal DG scheme. Thus far, these schemes have been analyzed primarily in the context of pure advection problems on triangles. For the first time, this paper constructs VCJH schemes for advection–diffusion problems on triangles, and proves the stability of these schemes for linear advection–diffusion problems for all orders of accuracy. In addition, this paper uses numerical experiments on triangular grids to verify the stability and accuracy of VCJH schemes for linear advection–diffusion problems and the nonlinear Navier–Stokes equations.