Positivity-preserving discontinuous Galerkin scheme for linear hyperbolic equations with characteristics-informed augmentation

This paper presents a positivity-preserving discontinuous Galerkin (DG) scheme for the linear hyperbolic problem with variable coefficients on structured Cartesian domains. The standard DG spaces are augmented with either polynomial or non-polynomial basis functions. The primary purpose of these augmented basis functions is to ensure that the cell average from the unmodulated DG scheme remains positive. We explicitly obtain suitable basis functions by inspecting the method of characteristics on an auxiliary problem. A key result is proved which demonstrates that the unmodulated augmented DG scheme will retain a positive cell average, provided that the inflow, source term, and variable coefficients are positive. A simple scaling limiter can then be leveraged to produce a high-order conservative positivity-preserving DG scheme. Numerical experiments demonstrate the scheme is able to retain high-order accuracy as well as robustness for variable coefficients. To improve efficiency, an inexact augmented basis function can be obtained rather than a analytic non-polynomial solution to the auxiliary problem from the method of characteristics.