An arbitrary high-order Spectral Difference method for the induction equation

We study in this paper three variants of the high-order Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method with Runge-Kutta (RK) time integration for the induction equation, analysing their ability to preserve the divergence free constraint of the magnetic field. To quantify divergence errors, we use a norm based on both a surface term, measuring global divergence errors, and a volume term, measuring local divergence errors. This leads us to design a new, arbitrary high-order numerical scheme for the induction equation in multiple space dimensions, based on a modification of the Spectral Difference (SD) method [1] with ADER time integration [2]. It appears as a natural extension of the Constrained Transport (CT) method. We show that it preserves $\nabla\cdot\vec{B}=0$ exactly by construction, both in a local and a global sense. We compare our new method to the 3 RKDG variants and show that the magnetic energy evolution and the solution maps of our new SD-ADER scheme are qualitatively similar to the RKDG variant with divergence cleaning, but without the need for an additional equation and an extra variable to control the divergence errors. [1] Liu Y., Vinokur M., Wang Z.J. (2006) Discontinuous Spectral Difference Method for Conservation Laws on Unstructured Grids. In: Groth C., Zingg D.W. (eds) Computational Fluid Dynamics 2004. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg [2] Dumbser M., Castro M., Pares C., Toro E.F (2009) ADER schemes on unstructured meshes for nonconservative hyperbolic systems: Applications to geophysical flows. In: Computers & Fluids, Volume 38, Issue 9