3 Papers

NAFeb 3, 2015
On the advantage of well-balanced schemes for moving-water equilibria of the shallow water equations

Yulong Xing, Chi-Wang Shu, Sebastian Noelle

This note aims at demonstrating the advantage of moving-water well-balanced schemes over still-water well-balanced schemes for the shallow water equations. We concentrate on numerical examples with solutions near a moving-water equilibrium. For such examples, still-water well-balanced methods are not capable of capturing the small perturbations of the moving-water equilibrium and may generate significant spurious oscillations, unless an extremely refined mesh is used. On the other hand, moving- water well-balanced methods perform well in these tests. The numerical examples in this note clearly demonstrate the importance of utilizing moving-water well-balanced methods for solutions near a moving-water equilibrium.

NAFeb 21, 2015
Analysis of mixed interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin methods for the Cahn-Hilliard equation and the Hele-Shaw flow

Xiaobing Feng, Yukun Li, Yulong Xing

This paper proposes and analyzes two fully discrete mixed interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for the fourth order nonlinear Cahn-Hilliard equation. Both methods use the backward Euler method for time discretization and interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin methods for spatial discretization. They differ from each other on how the nonlinear term is treated, one of them is based on fully implicit time-stepping and the other uses the energy-splitting time-stepping. The primary goal of the paper is to prove the convergence of the numerical interfaces of the DG methods to the interface of the Hele-Shaw flow. This is achieved by establishing error estimates that depend on $ε^{-1}$ only in some low polynomial orders, instead of exponential orders. Similar to [14], the crux is to prove a discrete spectrum estimate in the discontinuous Galerkin finite element space. However, the validity of such a result is not obvious because the DG space is not a subspace of the (energy) space $H^1$ and it is larger than the finite element space. This difficult is overcome by a delicate perturbation argument which relies on the discrete spectrum estimate in the finite element space proved in \cite{Feng_Prohl04}. Numerical experiment results are also presented to gauge the theoretical results and the performance of the proposed fully discrete mixed DG methods.

NAOct 22, 2010
Absolutely stable local discontinuous Galerkin methods for the Helmholtz equation with large wave number

Xiaobing Feng, Yulong Xing

Two local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) methods using some non-standard numerical fluxes are developed for the Helmholtz equation with the first order absorbing boundary condition in the high frequency regime. It is shown that the proposed LDG methods are absolutely stable (hence well-posed) with respect to both the wave number and the mesh size. Optimal order (with respect to the mesh size) error estimates are proved for all wave numbers in the preasymptotic regime. To analyze the proposed LDG methods, they are recasted and treated as (non-conforming) mixed finite element methods. The crux of the analysis is to establish a generalized {\em inf-sup} condition, which holds without any mesh constraint, for each LDG method. The generalized {\em inf-sup} conditions then easily infer the desired absolute stability of the proposed LDG methods. In return, the stability results not only guarantee the well-posedness of the LDG methods but also play a crucial role in the derivation of the error estimates. Numerical experiments, which confirm the theoretical results and compare the proposed two LDG methods, are also presented in the paper.