EPO: A Unified Framework for Entropy Stability, Positivity, and Oscillation Suppression

Abstract

High-order finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin methods are often stabilized by separate nonlinear devices for admissibility, entropy control, and oscillation suppression. This separation hides a simple geometric fact: all three act on the same cellwise candidate state. We propose a general framework (termed EPO) unifying fully discrete entropy stability, positivity/bound preservation, and spurious oscillation elimination. Starting from a candidate update, we scale along the ray anchored at its updated cell average. The admissible-state constraint, the entropy constraint, and the oscillation-suppressing constraint each define an admissibility radius on that ray, and the applied limiter is their minimum. The decisive analytical ingredient is a {\em weak entropy stability} at the level of the updated cell average. A two-point Lax--Friedrichs/Riemann-average entropy inequality yields local cell-average entropy budgets, and the same radial scaling mechanism behind Zhang--Shu positivity preservation lifts these weak budgets to strong quadrature-based entropy inequalities. The framework is therefore not a summation-by-parts, split-form, or flux-differencing construction: EPO acts on a candidate finite volume or discontinuous Galerkin update and converts weak average information into fully discrete nodal entropy stability. {\em The construction also works for any prescribed finite family of convex entropy pairs. Each pair yields its own entropy radius, and taking the minimum enforces fully discrete entropy stability for all of them simultaneously.} We prove the preservation of cell averages, invariant-set preservation, local and global strong entropy inequalities, stagewise budgets for strong-stability-preserving (SSP) Runge--Kutta methods, an SSP multistep variant that retains the designed high-order temporal accuracy, and extensions on rectangular and unstructured triangular meshes.