Superconvergence and Extrapolation Analysis of a Nonconforming Mixed Finite Element Approximation for Time-Harmonic Maxwell’s Equations

In this paper, a nonconforming mixed finite element approximating to the three-dimensional time-harmonic Maxwell’s equations is presented. On a uniform rectangular prism mesh, superclose property is achieved for electric field E and magnetic filed H with the boundary condition E×n=0 by means of the asymptotic expansion. Applying postprocessing operators, a superconvergence result is stated for the discretization error of the postprocessed discrete solution to the solution itself. To our best knowledge, this is the first global superconvergence analysis of nonconforming mixed finite elements for the Maxwell’s equations. Furthermore, the approximation accuracy will be improved by extrapolation method.     

Non-Reflecting Boundary Conditions for Maxwell’s Equations

A new discrete non-reflecting boundary condition for the time-dependent Maxwell equations describing the propagation of an electromagnetic wave in an infinite homogenous lossless rectangular waveguide with perfectly conducting walls is presented. It is derived from a virtual spatial finite difference discretization of the problem on the unbounded domain. Fourier transforms are used to decouple transversal modes. A judicious combination of edge based nodal values permits us to recover a simple structure in the Laplace domain. Using this, it is possible to approximate the convolution in time by a similar fast convolution algorithm as for the standard wave equation.     

A Finite Element Method with Strong Mass Conservation for Biot’s Linear Consolidation Model

An H(div) conforming finite element method for solving the linear Biot equations is analyzed. Formulations for the standard mixed method are combined with formulation of interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method to obtain a consistent scheme. Optimal convergence rates are obtained.     

Locally Implicit Time Integration Strategies in a Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Maxwell’s Equations

An attractive feature of discontinuous Galerkin (DG) spatial discretization is the possibility of using locally refined space grids to handle geometrical details. However, locally refined meshes lead to severe stability constraints on explicit integration methods to numerically solve a time-dependent partial differential equation. If the region of refinement is small relative to the computational domain, the time step size restriction can be overcome by blending an implicit and an explicit scheme where only the solution variables living at fine elements are treated implicitly. The downside of this approach is having to solve a linear system per time step. But due to the assumed small region of refinement relative to the computational domain, the overhead will also be small while the solution can be advanced in time with step sizes determined by the coarse elements. In this paper, we present two locally implicit time integration methods for solving the time-domain Maxwell equations spatially discretized with a DG method. Numerical experiments for two-dimensional problems illustrate the theory and the usefulness of the implicit–explicit approaches in presence of local refinements.     

A Linearized Local Conservative Mixed Finite Element Method for Poisson–Nernst–Planck Equations

In this paper, a linearized local conservative mixed finite element method is proposed and analyzed for Poisson–Nernst–Planck (PNP) equations, where the mass fluxes and the potential flux are introduced as new vector-valued variables to equations of ionic concentrations (Nernst–Planck equations) and equation of the electrostatic potential (Poisson equation), respectively. These flux variables are crucial to PNP equations on determining the Debye layer and computing the electric current in an accurate fashion. The Raviart–Thomas mixed finite element is employed for the spatial discretization, while the backward Euler scheme with linearization is adopted for the temporal discretization and decoupling nonlinear terms, thus three linear equations are separately solved at each time step. The proposed method is more efficient in practice, and locally preserves the mass conservation. By deriving the boundedness of numerical solutions in certain strong norms, an unconditionally optimal error analysis is obtained for all six unknowns: the concentrations p and n, the mass fluxes \({{\varvec{J}}}_p=\nabla p + p {\varvec{\sigma }}\) and \({{\varvec{J}}}_n=\nabla n - n {\varvec{\sigma }}\), the potential \(\psi \) and the potential flux \({\varvec{\sigma }}= \nabla \psi \) in \(L^{\infty }(L^2)\) norm. Numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency and to validate the convergence theorem of the proposed method.     

A Legendre Pseudospectral Penalty Scheme for Solving Time-Domain Maxwell’s Equations

In this paper we present a Legendre pseudospectral algorithm based on a tensor product formulation for solving the time-domain Maxwell equations. Our approach starts by conducting an analysis for finding well-posed boundary operators for the Maxwell equations. We then discuss equivalent characteristic boundary conditions for common physical boundary constraints. These theoretical results are then employed to construct a pseudospectral penalty scheme which is asymptotically stable at the semidiscrete level. Numerical computations based on the proposed scheme are also provided for different cases where exact solutions exist. By measuring the differences between the computed and exact solutions, we observe the expected convergence patterns of the scheme. This work is supported by National Science Council grant No. NSC 95-2120-M-001-003.     

An easy and efficient combination of the Mixed Finite Element Method and the Method of Lines for the resolution of Richards’ Equation

In this work, the Mixed Hybrid Finite Element (MHFE) method is combined with the Method Of Lines (MOL) for an accurate resolution of the Richard's Equation (RE). The combination of these methods is often complicated since hybridization requires a discrete approximation of the time derivative whereas with the MOL, it should remain continuous. In this paper, we use the new mass lumping technique developed in Younes et al. [Younes, A., Ackerer, P., Lehmann, F., 2006. A new mass lumping scheme for the mixed hybrid finite element method. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering 67, pp. 89–107.] for the MHFE method. With this formulation, the MOL is easily implemented and sophisticated time integration packages can be used without significant amount of work.Numerical simulations are performed on both homogeneous and heterogeneous porous media to show the efficiency and robustness of the developed scheme.     

Discontinuous Hamiltonian Finite Element Method for Linear Hyperbolic Systems

We develop a Hamiltonian discontinuous finite element discretization of a generalized Hamiltonian system for linear hyperbolic systems, which include the rotating shallow water equations, the acoustic and Maxwell equations. These equations have a Hamiltonian structure with a bilinear Poisson bracket, and as a consequence the phase-space structure, “mass” and energy are preserved. We discretize the bilinear Poisson bracket in each element with discontinuous elements and introduce numerical fluxes via integration by parts while preserving the skew-symmetry of the bracket. This automatically results in a mass and energy conservative discretization. When combined with a symplectic time integration method, energy is approximately conserved and shows no drift. For comparison, the discontinuous Galerkin method for this problem is also used. A variety numerical examples is shown to illustrate the accuracy and capability of the new method.     

Adaptive Finite Element Methods for Microstructures? Numerical Experiments for a 2-Well Benchmark

Macroscopic simulations of non-convex minimisation problems with enforced microstructures encounter oscillations on finest length scales – too fine to be fully resolved. The numerical analysis must rely on an essentially equivalent relaxed mathematical model. The paper addresses a prototype example, the scalar 2-well minimisation problem and its convexification and introduces a benchmark problem with a known (generalised) solution. For this benchmark, the stress error is studied empirically to asses the performance of adaptive finite element methods for the relaxed and the original minimisation problem. Despite the theoretical reliability-efficiency gap for the relaxed problem, numerical evidence supports that adaptive mesh-refining algorithms generate efficient triangulations and improve the experimental convergence rates optimally. Moreover, the averaging error estimators perform surprisingly accurate.     

Linearized Conservative Finite Element Methods for the Nernst–Planck–Poisson Equations

The aim of this paper is to present and study new linearized conservative schemes with finite element approximations for the Nernst–Planck–Poisson equations. For the linearized backward Euler FEM, an optimal \(L^2\) error estimate is provided almost unconditionally (i.e., when the mesh size h and time step \(\tau \) are less than a small constant). Global mass conservation and electric energy decay of the schemes are also proved. Extension to second-order time discretizations is given. Numerical results in both two- and three-dimensional spaces are provided to confirm our theoretical analysis and show the optimal convergence, unconditional stability, global mass conservation and electric energy decay properties of the proposed schemes.     

Energy Stable Nodal Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Nonlinear Maxwell’s Equations in Multi-dimensions

Journal of Scientific Computing - The scalar, one-dimensional advection equation and heat equation are considered. These equations are discretized in space, using a finite difference method...     

The Unstructured Mesh Finite Element Method for the Two-Dimensional Multi-term Time–Space Fractional Diffusion-Wave Equation on an Irregular Convex Domain

In this paper, the two-dimensional multi-term time-space fractional diffusion-wave equation on an irregular convex domain is considered as a much more general case for wider applications in fluid mechanics. A novel unstructured mesh finite element method is proposed for the considered equation. In most existing works, the finite element method is applied on regular domains using uniform meshes. The case of irregular convex domains, which would require subdivision using unstructured meshes, is mostly still open. Furthermore, the orders of the multi-term time-fractional derivatives have been considered to belong to (0, 1] or (1, 2] separately in existing models. In this paper, we consider two-dimensional multi-term time-space fractional diffusion-wave equations with the time fractional orders belonging to the whole interval (0, 2) on an irregular convex domain. We propose to use a mixed difference scheme in time and an unstructured mesh finite element method in space. Detailed implementation and the stability and convergence analyses of the proposed numerical scheme are given. Numerical examples are conducted to evaluate the theoretical analysis.     

A Rectangular Finite Volume Element Method for a Semilinear Elliptic Equation

In this paper we extend the idea of interpolated coefficients for semilinear problems to the finite volume element method based on rectangular partition. At first we introduce bilinear finite volume element method with interpolated coefficients for a boundary value problem of semilinear elliptic equation. Next we derive convergence estimate in H ¹-norm and superconvergence of derivative. Finally an example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. This work is supported by Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of China State Education Ministry, National Science Foundation of China, the National Basic Research Program under the Grant (2005CB321703), the key project of China State Education Ministry (204098), Scientific Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 20060390894) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 20060390894).     

Discontinuous Finite Volume Element Method for a Coupled Non-stationary Stokes–Darcy Problem

In this paper, a discontinuous finite volume element method was presented to solve the nonstationary Stokes–Darcy problem for the coupling fluid flow in conduits with porous media flow. The proposed numerical method is constructed on a baseline finite element family of discontinuous linear elements for the approximation of the velocity and hydraulic head, whereas the pressure is approximated by piecewise constant elements. The unique solvability of the approximate solution for the discrete problem is derived. Optimal error estimates of the semi-discretization and full discretization with backward Euler scheme in standard \(L^2\)-norm and broken \(H^1\)-norm are obtained for three discontinuous finite volume element methods (symmetric, non-symmetric and incomplete types). A series of numerical experiments are provided to illustrate the features of the proposed method, such as the optimal accuracy orders, mass conservation, capability to deal with complicated geometries, and applicability to the problems with realistic parameters.     

An Adaptive Method for Recovering Image from Mixed Noisy Data

In this paper, we present a new version of the famous Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (ROF) model to restore image. The key point of the model is that it could reconstruct images with blur and non-uniformly distributed noise. We develop this approach by adding several statistical control parameters to the cost functional, and these parameters could be adaptively determined by the given observed image. In this way, we could adaptively balance the performance of the fit-to-data term and the regularization term. The Numerical experiments have demonstrated the significant effectiveness and robustness of our model in restoring blurred images with mixed Gaussian noise or salt-and-pepper noise.