Characteristic local discontinuous Galerkin methods for solving time-dependent convection-dominated Navier-Stokes equations

Combining the characteristic method and the local discontinuous Galerkin method with carefully constructing numerical fluxes, we design the variational formulations for the time-dependent convection-dominated Navier-Stokes equations in $\mathbb{R}^2$. The proposed symmetric variational formulation is strictly proved to be unconditionally stable; and the scheme has the striking benefit that the conditional number of the matrix of the corresponding matrix equation does not increase with the refining of the meshes. The presented scheme works well for a wide range of Reynolds numbers, e.g., the scheme still has good error convergence when $Re=0.5 e+005$ or $1.0 e+ 008$. Extensive numerical experiments are performed to show the optimal convergence orders and the contours of the solutions of the equation with given initial and boundary conditions.