Igor Voulis

Sergio Gómez, Chiara Perinati, Paul Stocker et al.

We present and analyze an embedded Trefftz discontinuous Galerkin method for reaction-diffusion problems on anisotropic meshes. The method is constructed by imposing a relaxed local Trefftz condition via an embedding into a tensor-product DG space, yielding a reduced global system while preserving the approximation properties of the underlying high-order discretization. We prove stability and quasi-optimality on anisotropic, possibly curved, quadrilateral elements, and derive anisotropic a priori error estimates. Numerical experiments for $h$- and $hp$-refinement, including curved-domain examples, validate the theoretical results.

Igor Voulis, Arnold Reusken

In this paper a time dependent Stokes problem that is motivated by a standard sharp interface model for the fluid dynamics of two-phase flows is studied. This Stokes interface problem has discontinuous density and viscosity coefficients and a pressure solution that is discontinuous across an evolving interface. This strongly simplified two-phase Stokes equation is considered to be a good model problem for the development and analysis of finite element discretization methods for two-phase flow problems. In view of the unfitted finite element methods that are often used for two-phase flow simulations, we are particularly interested in a well-posed variational formulation of this Stokes interface problem in a Euclidean setting. Such well-posed weak formulations, which are not known in the literature, are the main results of this paper. Different variants are considered, namely one with suitable spaces of divergence free functions, a discrete-in-time version of it, and variants in which the divergence free constraint in the solution space is treated by a pressure Lagrange multiplier. The discrete-in-time variational formulation involving the pressure variable for the divergence free constraint is a natural starting point for a space-time finite element discretization. Such a method is introduced and results of numerical experiments with this method are presented.

Igor Voulis, Arnold Reusken

We consider time discretization methods for abstract parabolic problems with inhomogeneous linear constraints. Prototype examples that fit into the general framework are the heat equation with inhomogeneous (time dependent) Dirichlet boundary conditions and the time dependent Stokes equation with an inhomogeneous divergence constraint. Two common ways of treating such linear constraints, namely explicit or implicit (via Lagrange multipliers) are studied. These different treatments lead to different variational formulations of the parabolic problem. For these formulations we introduce a modification of the standard discontinuous Galerkin (DG) time discretization method in which an appropriate projection is used in the discretization of the constraint. For these discretizations (optimal) error bounds, including superconvergence results, are derived. Discretization error bounds for the Lagrange multiplier are presented. Results of experiments confirm the theoretically predicted optimal convergence rates and show that without the modification the (standard) DG method has sub-optimal convergence behavior.

Paul Stocker, Igor Voulis

We study an embedded Trefftz discontinuous Galerkin method for the Helmholtz equation. The method starts from a polynomial DG space and enforces the Trefftz property through local constraints, avoiding an explicit construction of Trefftz basis functions. For the global coupling we use a simple symmetric interior penalty DG bilinear form. Since the resulting formulation is not coercive, stability is proved by a $T$-coercivity argument combined with a Schatz-type duality technique. This yields wavenumber-explicit stability, quasi-optimality, and convergence estimates in standard DG norms under an explicit mesh resolution condition.