Mimetic Metrics for the DGSEM

Free-stream preservation is an essential property for numerical solvers on curvilinear grids. Key to this property is that the metric terms of the curvilinear mapping satisfy discrete metric identities, i.e., have zero divergence. Divergence-free metric terms are furthermore essential for entropy stability on curvilinear grids. We present a new way to compute the metric terms for discontinuous Galerkin spectral element methods (DGSEMs) that guarantees they are divergence-free. Our proposed mimetic approach uses projections that fit within the de Rham Cohomology.