Colin J Cotter

Werner Bauer, Colin J Cotter

We describe an energy-enstrophy conserving discretisation for the rotating shallow water equations with slip boundary conditions. This relaxes the assumption of boundary-free domains (periodic solutions or the surface of a sphere, for example) in the energy-enstrophy conserving formulation of McRae and Cotter (2014). This discretisation requires extra prognostic vorticity variables on the boundary in addition to the prognostic velocity and layer depth variables. The energy-enstrophy conservation properties hold for any appropriate set of compatible finite element spaces defined on arbitrary meshes with arbitrary boundaries. We demonstrate the conservation properties of the scheme with numerical solutions on a rotating hemisphere.

Colin J Cotter, Kars Knook, Joshua Hope-Collins

We provide an iterative solution approach for the indefinite Helmholtz equation discretised using finite elements, based upon a Hermitian Skew-Hermitian Splitting (HSS) iteration applied to the shifted operator, and prove that the iteration is k- and mesh-robust when O(k) HSS iterations are performed. The HSS iterations involve solving a shifted operator that is suitable for approximation by multigrid using standard smoothers and transfer operators, and hence we can use O(N) parallel processors in a high performance computing implementation, where N is the total number of degrees of freedom. We argue that the algorithm converges in O(k) wallclock time when within the range of scalability of the multigrid. We provide numerical results in both 2D and 3D verifying our proofs and demonstrating this claim, establishing a method that can make use of large scale high performance computing systems.

Colin J Cotter, Darryl D Holm

We focus on the spatial discretization produced by the Variational Particle-Mesh (VPM) method for a prototype fluid equation the known as the EPDiff equation}, which is short for Euler-Poincaré equation associated with the diffeomorphism group (of $\mathbb{R}^d$, or of a $d$-dimensional manifold $Ω$). The EPDiff equation admits measure valued solutions, whose dynamics are determined by the momentum maps for the left and right actions of the diffeomorphisms on embedded subspaces of $\mathbb{R}^d$. The discrete VPM analogs of those dynamics are studied here. Our main results are: (i) a variational formulation for the VPM method, expressed in terms of a constrained variational principle principle for the Lagrangian particles, whose velocities are restricted to a distribution $D_{\VPM}$ which is a finite-dimensional subspace of the Lie algebra of vector fields on $Ω$; (ii) a corresponding constrained variational principle on the fixed Eulerian grid which gives a discrete version of the Euler-Poincaré equation; and (iii) discrete versions of the momentum maps for the left and right actions of diffeomorphisms on the space of solutions.