Discontinuous Galerkin methods through the lens of variational multiscale analysis

In this article, we present a theoretical framework for integrating discontinuous Galerkin methods in the variational multiscale paradigm. Our starting point is a projector-based multiscale decomposition of a generic variational formulation that uses broken Sobolev spaces and Lagrange multipliers to accommodate the non-conforming nature at the boundaries of discontinuous Galerkin elements. We show that existing discontinuous Galerkin formulations, including their penalty terms, follow immediately from a specific choice of multiscale projector. We proceed by defining the “fine-scale closure function”, which captures the closure relation between the remaining fine-scale term in the discontinuous Galerkin formulation and the coarse-scale solution via a single integral expression for each basis function in the coarse-scale test space. We show that the projectors that correspond to discontinuous Galerkin methods lead to fine-scale closure functions with more compact support and smaller amplitudes compared to the fine-scale closure function of the classical (conforming) finite element method. This observation provides a new perspective on the natural stability of discontinuous Galerkin methods for hyperbolic problems, and may open the door to rigorously designed variational multiscale based fine-scale models that are suitable for DG methods.