High-order Finite Difference and Finite Volume WENO Schemes and Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for CFD

Abstract

In recent years, high order numerical methods have been widely used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), to effectively resolve complex flow features using meshes which are reasonable for today's computers. In this paper, we review and compare three types of high order methods being used in CFD, namely the weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) finite difference methods, the WENO finite volume methods, and the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element methods. We summarize the main features of these methods, from a practical user's point of view, indicate their applicability and relative strength, and show a few selected numerical examples to demonstrate their performance on illustrative model CFD problems.