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High-Order Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Methods with Globally Divergence-Free Constrained Transport for Ideal MHD

The modification of the celebrated Yee scheme from Maxwell equations to magnetohydrodynamics is often referred to as the constrained transport approach. Constrained transport can be viewed as a sort of predictor-corrector method for updating the magnetic field, where a magnetic field value is first predicted by a method that does not preserve the divergence-free condition on the magnetic field, followed by a correction step that aims to control these divergence errors. This strategy has been successfully used in conjunction with a variety of shock-capturing methods including WENO, central, and wave propagation schemes. In this work we show how to extend the basic CT framework to the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method on both 2D and 3D Cartesian grids. We first review the entropy-stability theory for semi-discrete DG discretizations of ideal MHD, which rigorously establishes the need for a magnetic field that satisfies the following conditions: (1) the divergence of the magnetic field is zero on each element, and (2) the normal components of the magnetic field are continuous across element edges/faces. In order to achieve such a globally divergence-free magnetic field, we introduce a novel CT scheme that is based on two ingredients: (1) we introduce an element-centered magnetic vector potential that is updated via a discontinuous Galerkin scheme on the induction equation; and (2) we define a mapping that takes element-centered magnetic field values and element-centered magnetic vector potential values and creates on each edge /face a representation of the normal component of the magnetic field; this representation is then mapped back to the elements to create a globally divergence-free element-centered representation of the magnetic field. For problems with shock waves, we make use of so-called moment-based limiters to control oscillations in the conserved quantities.