  Controlling spurious oscillations is crucial for designing reliable numerical
schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws. This paper proposes a novel, robust,
and efficient oscillation-eliminating discontinuous Galerkin (OEDG) method on
general meshes, motivated by the damping technique in [Lu, Liu, and Shu, SIAM
J. Numer. Anal., 59:1299-1324, 2021]. The OEDG method incorporates an OE
procedure after each Runge-Kutta stage, devised by alternately evolving
conventional semidiscrete DG scheme and a damping equation. A novel damping
operator is carefully designed to possess scale-invariant and
evolution-invariant properties. We rigorously prove optimal error estimates of
the fully discrete OEDG method for linear scalar conservation laws. This might
be the first generic fully-discrete error estimates for nonlinear DG schemes
with automatic oscillation control mechanism. The OEDG method exhibits many
notable advantages. It effectively eliminates spurious oscillations for
challenging problems across various scales and wave speeds, without
problem-specific parameters. It obviates the need for characteristic
decomposition in hyperbolic systems. It retains key properties of conventional
DG method, such as conservation, optimal convergence rates, and
superconvergence. Moreover, it remains stable under normal CFL condition. The
OE procedure is non-intrusive, facilitating integration into existing DG codes
as an independent module. Its implementation is easy and efficient, involving
only simple multiplications of modal coefficients by scalars. The OEDG approach
provides new insights into the damping mechanism for oscillation control. It
reveals the role of damping operator as a modal filter and establishes close
relations between the damping and spectral viscosity techniques. Extensive
numerical results confirm the theoretical analysis and validate the
effectiveness and advantages of the OEDG method.
