An entropy conserving/stable discontinuous Galerkin solver in entropy variables based on the direct enforcement of entropy balance

Numerical schemes that guarantee the preservation of flow properties as prescribed by physical laws, ensure high-fidelity results and improved computational robustness. This work presents a highly accurate entropy conserving/stable solver for the solution of the compressible Euler equations. The method uses a modal Discontinuous Galerkin approximation and takes advantage of both entropy variables and the Direct Enforcement of Entropy Balance (DEEB), proposed by Abgrall [1] to fulfill the second law of thermodynamics at the discrete level. Thanks to the use of an orthonormal modal basis, the cost of adding the DEEB correction to the spatially discretized equations is negligible. Entropy variables are used directly, as unknowns, or to assemble the discrete operators while solving for the conservative variables. In the latter case, the conservative variables are “converted” into the entropy ones through an L2 “entropy projection”. If this strategy is coupled with DEEB, a very efficient alternative to the direct use of the entropy variables is obtained, with a dramatic improvement in robustness over the direct use of the conservative variables. For the time integration both an explicit Strong Stability Preserving Runge-Kutta scheme and the implicit Generalized Crank-Nicolson method are considered. The latter allows for the construction of a discrete entropy conservative/stable scheme both in space and time to be used as a reference. Convergence and conservation properties are demonstrated together with robustness and computational efficiency on a suite of two-dimensional test cases, showing that by coupling DEEB with entropy projection the solver robustness is improved while not affecting the stability limit.