A structure-preserving discontinuous Galerkin scheme for the Fischer-KPP equation
For researchers in numerical analysis and mathematical biology, this provides a provably stable and structure-preserving numerical method for a classic reaction-diffusion equation.
The paper proposes an implicit Euler discontinuous Galerkin scheme for the Fisher-KPP equation that preserves positivity and satisfies a discrete entropy inequality, proving exponential decay to the steady state and convergence in L2 norm. Numerical experiments in 1D confirm the theoretical results.
An implicit Euler discontinuous Galerkin scheme for the Fisher-Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piscounov (Fisher-KPP) equation for population densities with no-flux boundary conditions is suggested and analyzed. Using an exponential variable transformation, the numerical scheme automatically preserves the positivity of the discrete solution. A discrete entropy inequality is derived, and the exponential time decay of the discrete density to the stable steady state in the L1 norm is proved if the initial entropy is smaller than the measure of the domain. The discrete solution is proved to converge in the L2 norm to the unique strong solution to the time-discrete Fisher-KPP equation as the mesh size tends to zero. Numerical experiments in one space dimension illustrate the theoretical results.