SUMMARYIn this paper, we introduce a shock-capturing artificial viscosity technique for high-order unstructured mesh methods. This artificial viscosity model is based on a non-dimensional form of the divergence of the velocity. The technique is an extension and improvement of the dilation-based artificial viscosity methods introduced in Premasuthan et al. [15] and further extended in Nguyen and Peraire [27]. The approach presented has a number attractive properties including non-dimensional analytical form, sub-cell resolution, and robustness for complex shock flows on anisotropic meshes. We present extensive numerical results to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.