The high order inverse Lax-Wendroff (ILW) procedure is extended to boundary treatment involving complex geometries on a Cartesian mesh. Our method ensures that the numerical resolution at the vicinity of the boundary and the inner domain keeps the fifth order accuracy for the system of the reactive Euler equations with the two-step reaction model. Shock wave propagation in a tube with an array of rectangular grooves is first numerically simulated by combining a fifth order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme and the ILW boundary treatment. Compared with the experimental results, the ILW treatment accurately captures the evolution of shock wave during the interactions of the shock waves with the complex obstacles. Excellent agreement between our numerical results and the experimental ones further demonstrates the reliability and accuracy of the ILW treatment. Compared with the immersed boundary method (IBM), it is clear that the influence on pressure peaks in the reflected zone is obviously bigger than that in the diffracted zone. Furthermore, we also simulate the propagation process of detonation wave in a tube with three different widths of wall-mounted rectangular obstacles located on the lower wall. It is shown that the shock pressure along a horizontal line near the rectangular obstacles gradually decreases, and the detonation cellular size become large and irregular with the decrease of the obstacle width.

In this paper we present a fully discrete A-ø finite element method to solve Maxwell’s equations with a nonlinear degenerate boundary condition, which represents a generalization of the classical Silver-Müller condition for a non-perfect conductor. The relationship between the normal components of the electric field E and the magnetic field H obeys a power-law nonlinearity of the type H x n = n x (|E x n|α-1E x n) with α ∈ (0,1]. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the solutions of the proposed A-ø scheme and derive the error estimates. Finally, we present some numerical experiments to verify the theoretical result.

We introduce efficient approaches to construct high order finite difference discretizations for solving partial differential equations, based on a composite grid hierarchy. We introduce a modification of the traditional point clustering algorithm, obtained by adding restrictive parameters that control the minimal patch length and the size of the buffer zone. As a result, a reduction in the number of interfacial cells is observed. Based on a reasonable geometric grid setting, we discuss a general approach for the construction of stencils in a composite grid environment. The straightforward approach leads to an ill-posed problem. In our approach we regularize this problem, and transform it into solving a symmetric system of linear of equations. Finally, a stencil repository has been designed to further reduce computational overhead. The effectiveness of the discretizations is illustrated by numerical experiments on second order elliptic differential equations.

We propose a method that combines Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) with the interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (IPDG) method for solving the Allen-Cahn equation, arising from phase transition in materials science, on three-dimensional (3D) surfaces consisting of multiple patches. DG ideology is adopted at patch level, i.e., we employ the standard IGA within each patch, and employ the IPDG method across the patch interfaces. IGA is very suitable for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) on (3D) surfaces and the IPDG method is used to glue the multiple patches together to get the right solution. Our method takes advantage of both IGA and the IPDG method, which allows us to design a superior semi-discrete (in time) IPDG scheme. First and most importantly, the time-consuming mesh generation process in traditional Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is no longer necessary and refinements, including h-refinement and p-refinement which both maintain the original geometry, can be easily performed at any level. Moreover, the flexibility of the IPDG method makes our method very easy to handle cases with non-conforming patches and different degrees across the patch interfaces. Additionally, the geometrical error is eliminated (for all conic sections) or significantly reduced at the beginning due to the geometric flexibility of IGA basis functions, especially the use of multiple patches. Finally, this method can be easily formulated and implemented. We present our semi-discrete IPDG scheme after generally describe the problem, and then briefly introduce the time marching method employed in this paper. Theoretical analysis is carried out to show that our method satisfies a discrete energy law, and achieves the optimal convergence rate with respect to the L2 norm. Furthermore, we propose an elliptic projection operator on (3D) surfaces and prove an approximation error estimate which are vital for us to obtain the error estimate in the L2 norm. Numerical tests are given to validate the theory and gauge the good performance of our method.

A finite volume simulation of unsteady vortical wake flow behind a square-back estate car is presented. The three-dimensional time-averaged incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are solved together with the Reynolds stress transport equations for turbulence. By virtue of the simulated surface streamlines, the physics of fluid can be extracted using the topological theory. In addition, the simulated topological singular points and lines of separation are plotted on the car surface. The vortical flow motions that developed behind the mirrors, wheels and car body are explored by means of the simulated time evolving vortex corelines. The formation and interaction of the vortex systems in the wake are examined by tracing the instantaneous streamlines in the vicinity of the simulated vortex corelines. The vortex street behind the estate car is also illustrated by the simulated streaklines. Finally the Hopf bifurcation phenomenon is revealed by the time-varying aerodynamic forces on the car.

This paper presents a new and better suited formulation to implement the limiting projection to high-order schemes that make use of high-order local reconstructions for hyperbolic conservation laws. The scheme, so-called MCV-WENO4 (multi-moment Constrained finite Volume with WENO limiter of 4th order) method, is an extension of the MCV method of Ii & Xiao (2009) by adding the 1st order derivative (gradient or slope) at the cell center as an additional constraint for the cell-wise local reconstruction. The gradient is computed from a limiting projection using the WENO (weighted essentially non-oscillatory) reconstruction that is built from the nodal values at 5 solution points within 3 neighboring cells. Different from other existing methods where only the cell-average value is used in the WENO reconstruction, the present method takes account of the solution structure within each mesh cell, and thus minimizes the stencil for reconstruction. The resulting scheme has 4th-order accuracy and is of significant advantage in algorithmic simplicity and computational efficiency. Numerical results of one and two dimensional benchmark tests for scalar and Euler conservation laws are shown to verify the accuracy and oscillation-less property of the scheme.

A direct-forcing immersed boundary method (DFIB) with both virtual force and heat source is developed here to solve Navier-Stokes and the associated energy transport equations to study some thermal flow problems caused by a moving rigid solid object within. The key point of this novel numerical method is that the solid object, stationary or moving, is first treated as fluid governed by Navier-Stokes equations for velocity and pressure, and by energy transport equation for temperature in every time step. An additional virtual force term is then introduced on the right hand side of momentum equations in the solid object region to make it act exactly as if it were a solid rigid body immersed in the fluid. Likewise, an additional virtual heat source term is applied to the right hand side of energy equation at the solid object region to maintain the solid object at the prescribed temperature all the time. The current method was validated by some benchmark forced and natural convection problems such as a uniform flow past a heated circular cylinder, and a heated circular cylinder inside a square enclosure. We further demonstrated this method by studying a mixed convection problem involving a heated circular cylinder moving inside a square enclosure. Our current method avoids the otherwise requested dynamic grid generation in traditional method and shows great efficiency in the computation of thermal and flow fields caused by fluid-structure interaction.

The purpose of this study is to enhance the stability properties of our recently-developed numerical method [D. Kamensky, M.-C. Hsu, D. Schillinger, J.A. Evans, A. Aggarwal, Y. Bazilevs, M.S. Sacks, T.J.R. Hughes, “An immersogeometric variational framework for fluid-structure interaction: Application to bioprosthetic heart valves”, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., 284 (2015) 1005–1053] for immersing spline-based representations of shell structures into unsteady viscous incompressible flows. In the cited work, we formulated the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem using an augmented Lagrangian to enforce kinematic constraints. We discretized this Lagrangian as a set of collocated constraints, at quadrature points of the surface integration rule for the immersed interface. Because the density of quadrature points is not controlled relative to the fluid discretization, the resulting semi-discrete problem may be over-constrained. Semi-implicit time integration circumvents this difficulty in the fully-discrete scheme. If this time-stepping algorithm is applied to fluid-structure systems that approach steady solutions, though, we find that spatially-oscillating modes of the Lagrange multiplier field can grow over time. In the present work, we stabilize the semi-implicit integration scheme to prevent potential divergence of the multiplier field as time goes to infinity. This stabilized time integration may also be applied in pseudo-time within each time step, giving rise to a fully implicit solution method. We discuss the theoretical implications of this stabilization scheme for several simplified model problems, then demonstrate its practical efficacy through numerical examples.

It is well known that grid discontinuities have significant impact on the performance of finite difference schemes (FDSs). The geometric conservation law (GCL) is very important for FDSs on reducing numerical oscillations and ensuring free-stream preservation in curvilinear coordinate system. It is not quite clear how GCL works in finite difference method and how GCL errors affect spatial discretization errors especially in nonsmooth grids. In this paper, a method is developed to analyze the impact of grid discontinuities on the GCL errors and spatial discretization errors. A violation of GCL cause GCL errors which depend on grid smoothness, grid metrics method and finite difference operators. As a result there are more source terms in spatial discretization errors. The analysis shows that the spatial discretization accuracy on non-sufficiently smooth grids is determined by the discontinuity order of grids and can approach one higher order by following GCL. For sufficiently smooth grids, the spatial discretization accuracy is determined by the order of FDSs and FDSs satisfying the GCL can obtain smaller spatial discretization errors. Numerical tests have been done by the second-order and fourth-order FDSs to verify the theoretical results.

The extension of diamond scheme for diffusion equation to three dimensions is presented. The discrete normal flux is constructed by a linear combination of the directional flux along the line connecting cell-centers and the tangent flux along the cell-faces. In addition, it treats material discontinuities by a new iterative method. The stability and first-order convergence of the method is proved on distorted meshes. The numerical results illustrate that the method appears to be approximate second-order accuracy for solution.

In this work, we present a model for an aerosol (air/particle mixture) in the respiratory system. It consists of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for the air and the Vlasov equation for the particles in a fixed or moving domain, coupled through a drag force. We propose a discretization of the model, investigate stability properties of the numerical code and sensitivity to parameter perturbation. We also focus on the influence of the aerosol on the airflow.

The mathematical model for semiconductor devices in three space dimensions are numerically discretized. The system consists of three quasi-linear partial differential equations about three physical variables: the electrostatic potential, the electron concentration and the hole concentration. We use standard mixed finite element method to approximate the elliptic electrostatic potential equation. For the two convection-dominated concentration equations, a characteristics-mixed finite element method is presented. The scheme is locally conservative. The optimal L2-norm error estimates are derived by the aid of a post-processing step. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to validate the theoretical analysis.

The paper presents results on piecewise polynomial approximations of tensor product type in Sobolev-Slobodecki spaces by various interpolation and projection techniques, on error estimates for quadrature rules and projection operators based on hierarchical bases, and on inverse inequalities.

In this paper, we numerically study the ground and first excited states of the fractional Schrödinger equation in an infinite potential well. Due to the nonlocality of the fractional Laplacian, it is challenging to find the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the fractional Schrödinger equation analytically. We first introduce a normalized fractional gradient flow and then discretize it by a quadrature rule method in space and the semi-implicit Euler method in time. Our numerical results suggest that the eigenfunctions of the fractional Schrödinger equation in an infinite potential well differ from those of the standard (non-fractional) Schrödinger equation. We find that the strong nonlocal interactions represented by the fractional Laplacian can lead to a large scattering of particles inside of the potential well. Compared to the ground states, the scattering of particles in the first excited states is larger. Furthermore, boundary layers emerge in the ground states and additionally inner layers exist in the first excited states of the fractional nonlinear Schrödinger equation. Our simulated eigenvalues are consistent with the lower and upper bound estimates in the literature.

With the aim of solving in a four dimensional phase space a multi-scale Vlasov-Poisson system, we propose in a Particle-In-Cell framework a robust time-stepping method that works uniformly when the small parameter vanishes. As an exponential integrator, the scheme is able to use large time steps with respect to the typical size of the solution’s fast oscillations. In addition, we show numerically that the method has accurate long time behaviour and that it is asymptotic preserving with respect to the limiting Guiding Center system.

We discuss the development, verification, and performance of a GPU accelerated discontinuous Galerkin method for the solutions of two dimensional nonlinear shallow water equations. The shallow water equations are hyperbolic partial differential equations and are widely used in the simulation of tsunami wave propagations. Our algorithms are tailored to take advantage of the single instruction multiple data (SIMD) architecture of graphic processing units. The time integration is accelerated by local time stepping based on a multi-rate Adams-Bashforthscheme. A total variational bounded limiter is adopted for nonlinear stability of the numerical scheme. This limiter is coupled with a mass and momentum conserving positivity preserving limiter for the special treatment of a dry or partially wet element in the triangulation. Accuracy, robustness and performance are demonstrated with the aid of test cases. Furthermore, we developed a unified multi-threading model OCCA. The kernels expressed in OCCA model can be cross-compiled with multi-threading models OpenCL, CUDA, and OpenMP. We compare the performance of the OCCA kernels when cross-compiled with these models.

We define and investigate, via numerical analysis, a one dimensional toy-model of a cloud chamber. An energetic quantum particle, whose initial state is a superposition of two identical wave packets with opposite average momentum, interacts during its evolution and exchanges (small amounts of) energy with an array of localized spins. Triggered by the interaction with the environment, the initial superposition state turns into an incoherent sum of two states describing the following situation: or the particle is going to the left and a large number of spins on the left side changed their states, or the same is happening on the right side. This evolution is reminiscent of what happens in a cloud chamber where a quantum particle, emitted as a spherical wave by a radioactive source, marks its passage inside a supersaturated vapour-chamber in the form of a sequence of small liquid bubbles arranging themselves around a possible classical trajectory of the particle.

We consider the dynamics of the director in a nematic liquid crystal when under the influence of an applied electric field. Using an energy variational approach we derive a dynamic model for the director including both dissipative and inertial forces.

A numerical scheme for the model is proposed by extending a scheme for a related variational wave equation. Numerical experiments are performed studying the realignment of the director field when applying a voltage difference over the liquid crystal cell. In particular, we study how the relative strength of dissipative versus inertial forces influence the time scales of the transition between the initial configuration and the electrostatic equilibrium state.

Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) and matrix-free finite element methods with a novel projective pressure estimation are combined to enable the numerical modeling of magma dynamics in 2D and 3D using the library deal.II. The physical model is an advection-reaction type system consisting of two hyperbolic equations to evolve porosity and soluble mineral abundance at local chemical equilibrium and one elliptic equation to recover global pressure. A combination of a discontinuous Galerkin method for the advection equations and a finite element method for the elliptic equation provide a robust and efficient solution to the channel regime problems of the physical system in 3D. A projective and adaptively applied pressure estimation is employed to significantly reduce the computational wall time without impacting the overall physical reliability in the modeling of important features of melt segregation, such as melt channel bifurcation in 2D and 3D time dependent simulations.

In this paper, we compute a phase field (diffuse interface) model of Cahn-Hilliard type for moving contact line problems governing the motion of isothermal multiphase incompressible fluids. The generalized Navier boundary condition proposed by Qian et al. [1] is adopted here. We discretize model equations using a continuous finite element method in space and a modified midpoint scheme in time. We apply a penalty formulation to the continuity equation which may increase the stability in the pressure variable. Two kinds of immiscible fluids in a pipe and droplet displacement with a moving contact line under the effect of pressure driven shear flow are studied using a relatively coarse grid. We also derive the discrete energy law for the droplet displacement case, which is slightly different due to the boundary conditions. The accuracy and stability of the scheme are validated by examples, results and estimate order.