Efficient Time Discretization for Exploring Spatial Superconvergence of Discontinuous Galerkin Methods

We investigate two efficient time discretizations for the post-processing technique of discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods to solve hyperbolic conservation laws. The post-processing technique, which is applied at the final time of the DG method, can enhance the accuracy of the original DG solution (spatial superconvergence). One main difficulty of the post-processing technique is that the spatial superconvergence after post-processing needs to be matched with proper temporary accuracy. If the semi-discretized system (ODE system after spatial discretization) is under-resolved in time, then the space superconvergence will be concealed. In this paper, we focus our investigation on the recently designed SDG method and derive its explicit scheme from a correction process based on the DG weak formulation. We also introduce another similar technique, namely the spectral deferred correction (SDC) method. A comparison is made among both proposed time discretization techniques with the standard third-order Runge-Kutta method through several numerical examples, to conclude that both the SDG and SDC methods are efficient time discretization techniques for exploiting the spatial superconvergence of the DG methods.