A finite volume discontinuous Galerkin scheme for nonlinear convection-diffusion problems

A popular method for the discretization of conservation laws is the finite volume (FV) method, used extensively in CFD, based on piecewise constant approximation of the solution sought. However, the FV method has problems with the approximation of diffusion terms. Therefore, in several works [17-19,1,12,16,2], a combination of the FV and FE methods is used. To this end, it is necessary to construct various combinations of simplicial FE meshes with suitable associated FV grids. This is rather complicated from the point of view of the mesh refinement, particularly in 3D problems [20,21]. It is desirable to use only one mesh. The combination of FV and FE discretizations on the same triangular grid is proposed in [39]. Another possibility is to use the DG method (see [7] or [9] (and the references there) for a general survey). Here we shall use a compromise between the DG FE method and the FV method using piecewise linear discontinuous finite elements over the grid tau(h) and piecewise constant approximation of convective terms on the same grid.