A new class of efficient high order semi-Lagrangian IMEX discontinuous Galerkin methods on staggered unstructured meshes

In this paper we present a new high order semi-implicit discontinuous-Galerkin (DG) scheme on two-dimensional staggered triangular meshes applied to different nonlinear systems of hyperbolic conservation laws such as advection-diffusion models, incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and natural convection problems. While the temperature and pressure field are defined on a triangular main grid, the velocity field is defined on a quadrilateral edge-based staggered mesh. A semi-implicit time discretization is proposed, which separates slow and fast time scales by treating them explicitly and implicitly, respectively. The nonlinear convection terms are evolved explicitly using a semi-Lagrangian approach, whereas we consider an implicit discretization for the diffusion terms and the pressure contribution. High-order of accuracy in time is achieved using a new flexible and general framework of IMplicit-EXplicit (IMEX) Runge-Kutta schemes specifically designed to operate with semi-Lagrangian methods. To improve the efficiency in the computation of the DG divergence operator and the mass matrix, we propose to approximate the numerical solution with a less regular polynomial space on the edge-based mesh, which is defined on two sub-triangles that split the staggered quadrilateral elements. This allows for a fast computation of the DG operators and matrices without any need to store them for each mesh element. Due to the implicit treatment of the fast scale terms, the resulting numerical scheme is unconditionally stable for the considered governing equations because the semi-Lagrangian approach is the only explicit discretization for convection terms that does not need any stability restriction on the maximum admissible time step. Contrarily to a genuinely space-time discontinuous-Galerkin scheme, the IMEX discretization permits to preserve the symmetry and the positive semi-definiteness of the arising linear system for the pressure that can be solved at the aid of an efficient matrix-free implementation of the conjugate gradient method. We present several convergence results, including nonlinear transport and density currents, up to third order of accuracy in both space and time.