A positivity-preserving implicit-explicit scheme with high order polynomial basis for compressible Navier-Stokes equations

In this paper, we are interested in constructing a scheme solving compressible Navier--Stokes equations, with desired properties including high order spatial accuracy, conservation, and positivity-preserving of density and internal energy under a standard hyperbolic type CFL constraint on the time step size, e.g., $\Delta t=\mathcal O(\Delta x)$. Strang splitting is used to approximate convection and diffusion operators separately. For the convection part, i.e., the compressible Euler equation, the high order accurate postivity-preserving Runge--Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method can be used. For the diffusion part, the equation of internal energy instead of the total energy is considered, and a first order semi-implicit time discretization is used for the ease of achieving positivity. A suitable interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method for the stress tensor can ensure the conservation of momentum and total energy for any high order polynomial basis. In particular, positivity can be proven with $\Delta t=\mathcal{O}(\Delta x)$ if the Laplacian operator of internal energy is approximated by the $\mathbb{Q}^k$ spectral element method with $k=1,2,3$. So the full scheme with $\mathbb{Q}^k$ ($k=1,2,3$) basis is conservative and positivity-preserving with $\Delta t=\mathcal{O}(\Delta x)$, which is robust for demanding problems such as solutions with low density and low pressure induced by high-speed shock diffraction. Even though the full scheme is only first order accurate in time, numerical tests indicate that higher order polynomial basis produces much better numerical solutions, e.g., better resolution for capturing the roll-ups during shock reflection.