In this paper, the high-order space-time discontinuous Galerkin cell vertex scheme (DG-CVS) developed by the authors for hyperbolic conservation laws is extended for time dependent diffusion equations. In the extension, the treatment of the diffusive flux is exactly the same as that for the advective flux. Thanks to the Riemann-solver-free and reconstruction-free features of DG-CVS, both the advective flux and the diffusive flux are evaluated using continuous information across the cell interface. As a result, the resulting formulation with diffusive fluxes present is still consistent and does not need any extra ad hoc techniques to cure the common “variational crime” problem when traditional DG methods are applied to diffusion problems. For this reason, DG-CVS is conceptually simpler than other existing DG-typed methods.

This paper presents a novel high-order space-time method for hyperbolic conservation laws. Two important concepts, the staggered space-time mesh of the space-time conservation element/solution element (CE/SE) method and the local discontinuous basis functions of the space-time discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method, are the two key ingredients of the new scheme. The staggered space-time mesh is constructed using the cell-vertex structure of the underlying spatial mesh. The universal definitions of CEs and SEs are independent of the underlying spatial mesh and thus suitable for arbitrarily unstructured meshes. The solution within each physical time step is updated alternately at the cell level and the vertex level. For this solution updating strategy and the DG ingredient, the new scheme here is termed as the discontinuous Galerkin cell-vertex scheme (DG-CVS). The high order of accuracy is achieved by employing high-order Taylor polynomials as the basis functions inside each SE. The present DG-CVS exhibits many advantageous features such as Riemann-solver-free, high-order accuracy, point-implicitness, compactness, and ease of handling boundary conditions. Several numerical tests including the scalar advection equations and compressible Euler equations will demonstrate the performance of the new method.