Anisotropic adaptive refinement for discontinuous galerkin methods

We consider both the a priori and a posteriori error analysis and hp-adaptation strategies for discontinuous Galerkin interior penalty methods for second-order partial differential equations with nonnegative characteristic form on anisotropically refined computational meshes with anisotropically enriched polynomial degrees. In particular, we discuss the question of error estimation for linear target functionals, such as the outflow flux and the local average of the solution, exploiting duality based arguments.;The a priori error analysis is carried out in two settings. In the first, full orientation of elements is allowed but only (possibly high-order) isotropic polynomial degrees considered; our analysis, therefore, extends previous results, where only finite element spaces comprising piecewise linear polynomials were considered, by utilizing techniques from tensor analysis. In the second case, anisotropic polynomial degrees are allowed, but the elements are assumed to be axiparallel; we thus apply previously known interpolation error results to the goal-oriented setting.;Based on our a posteriori error bound we first design and implement an adaptive anisotropic h-refinement algorithm to ensure reliable and efficient control of the error in the prescribed functional to within a given tolerance. This involves exploiting both local isotropic and anisotropic mesh refinement, chosen on a competitive basis requiring the solution of local problems. The superiority of the proposed algorithm in comparison with a standard h-isotropic mesh refinement algorithm and a Hessian based h-anisotropic adaptive procedure is illustrated by a series of numerical experiments. We then describe a fully hp -adaptive algorithm, once again using a competitive refinement approach, which, numerical experiments reveal, offers considerable improvements over both a standard hp-isotropic refinement algorithm and an h-anisotropic/p-isotropic adaptive procedure.