Spectral analysis of high order continuous FEM for hyperbolic PDEs on triangular meshes: influence of approximation, stabilization, and time-stepping (Q6101594)

The objective of this paper is to identify strategies to build linearly stable fully explicit high-order continuous finite element schemes to discretize two-dimensional hyperbolic partial differential equations on triangulations of the spatial domain. For this purpose, the basis functions, the stabilization technique and the time discretization are varied. The standard finite element method (FEM) derived by this approach requires the inversion of a large sparse mass matrix. This procedure can be expensive. The authors use the so-called cubature elements, which leads to a diagonal mass matrix without losing the order of accuracy. Three different stabilization techniques are studied: the streamline upwind Petrov-Galerkin (SUPG) stabilization, the continuous interior penalty (CIP) method, the orthogonal subscale stabilization. Numerical simulations for both linear and nonlinear scalar problems, and for the shallow water system confirm the theoretical results.