Geometric Numerical Integration of Inequality Constrained, Nonsmooth Hamiltonian Systems
This work addresses the long-standing challenge of preserving geometric structures in nonsmooth Hamiltonian systems with inequality constraints, benefiting researchers in computational mechanics and physics.
The paper develops geometric numerical integration methods for Hamiltonian systems with equality and inequality constraints, achieving symplectic-momentum preservation, energy conservation, and smooth handling of multiple simultaneous inequality constraints. Numerical experiments demonstrate robust performance on challenging test cases with high-frequency constraint interactions.
We consider the geometric numerical integration of Hamiltonian systems subject to both equality and "hard" inequality constraints. As in the standard geometric integration setting, we target long-term structure preservation. We additionally, however, also consider invariant preservation over persistent, simultaneous and/or frequent boundary interactions. Appropriately formulating geometric methods to include such conditions has long-remained challenging due to the inherent nonsmoothness they impose. To resolve these issues we thus focus both on symplectic-momentum preserving behavior and the preservation of additional structures, unique to the inequality constrained setting. Leveraging discrete variational techniques, we construct a family of geometric numerical integration methods that not only obtain the usual desirable properties of momentum preservation, approximate energy conservation and equality constraint preservation, but also enforce multiple simultaneous inequality constraints, obtain smooth unilateral motion along constraint boundaries and allow for both nonsmooth and smooth boundary approach and exit trajectories. Numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the behavior of these methods on difficult test examples where both smooth and nonsmooth active constraint modes persist with high frequency.