Truncation Error Estimation in the p-Anisotropic Discontinuous Galerkin Spectral Element Method

In the context of discontinuous Galerkin spectral element methods (DGSEM), \tau -estimation has been successfully used for p-adaptation algorithms. This method estimates the truncation error of representations with different polynomial orders using the solution on a reference mesh of relatively high order. In this paper, we present a novel anisotropic truncation error estimator derived from the \tau -estimation procedure for the traditional DGSEM. We exploit the tensor product basis properties of the numerical solution to design a method where the total truncation error is calculated as a sum of its directional components. We show that the new error estimator is cheaper to evaluate than previous implementations of the \tau -estimation procedure and that it obtains more accurate extrapolations of the truncation error for representations of a higher order than the reference mesh. The robustness of the method allows performing the p-adaptation strategy with coarser reference solutions, thus further reducing the computational cost. The proposed estimator is validated using the method of manufactured solutions in a test case for the compressible Navier–Stokes equations.