Second order conservative Lagrangian DG schemes for compressible flow and their application in preserving spherical symmetry in two-dimensional cylindrical geometry

In this paper, we construct a class of second-order cell-centered Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin (DG) schemes for the two-dimensional compressible Euler equations on quadrilateral meshes. This Lagrangian DG scheme is based on the physical coordinates rather than the fixed reference coordinates, hence it does not require studying the evolution of the Jacobian matrix for the flow mapping between the different coordinates. The conserved variables are solved directly, and the scheme can preserve the conservation property for mass, momentum and total energy. The strong stability preserving (SSP) Runge-Kutta (RK) method is used for the time discretization. Furthermore, there are two main contributions. Firstly, differently from the previous work, we design a new Lagrangian DG scheme which is truly second-order accurate for all the variables such as density, momentum, total energy, pressure and velocity, while the similar DG schemes in the literature may lose second-order accuracy for certain variables, as shown in numerical experiments. Secondly, as an extension and application, we develop a particular Lagrangian DG scheme in the cylindrical geometry, which is designed to be able to preserve one-dimensional spherical symmetry for all the linear polynomials in two-dimensional cylindrical coordinates when computed on an equal-angle-zoned initial grid. The distinguished feature is that it can maintain both the spherical symmetry and conservation properties, which is very important for many applications such as implosion problems. A series of numerical experiments in the two-dimensional Cartesian and cylindrical coordinates are given to demonstrate the good performance of the Lagrangian DG schemes in terms of accuracy, symmetry and non-oscillation.