Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Mass Transfer through Semi-Permeable Membranes

A discontinuous Galerkin (dG) method for the numerical solution of initial/boundary value multi-compartment partial differential equation (PDE) models, interconnected with interface conditions, is presented and analysed. The study of interface problems is motivated by models of mass transfer of solutes through semi-permeable membranes. More specifically, a model problem consisting of a system of semilinear parabolic advection-diffusion-reaction partial differential equations in each compartment, equipped with respective initial and boundary conditions, is considered. Nonlinear interface conditions modelling selective permeability, congestion and partial reflection are applied to the compartment interfaces. An interior penalty dG method is presented for this problem and it is analysed in the space-discrete setting. The a priori analysis shows that the method yields optimal a priori bounds, provided the exact solution is sufficiently smooth. Numerical experiments indicate agreement with the theoretical bounds and highlight the stability of the numerical method in the advection-dominated regime

A posteriori energy-norm error estimates for advection-diffusion equations approximated by weighted interior penalty methods

22 pagesWe propose and analyze a posteriori energy-norm error estimates for weighted interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin approximations to advection-diffusion-reaction equations with heterogeneous and anisotropic diffusion. The weights, which play a key role in the analysis, depend on the diffusion tensor and are used to formulate the consistency terms in the discontinuous Galerkin method. The error upper bounds, in which all the constants are specified, consist of three terms: a residual estimator which depends only on the elementwise fluctuation of the discrete solution residual, a diffusive flux estimator where the weights used in the method enter explicitly, and a non-conforming estimator which is nonzero because of the use of discontinuous finite element spaces. The three estimators can be bounded locally by the approximation error. For moderate advection, it is shown that full robustness with respect to diffusion heterogeneities is achieved owing to the specific design of the weights in the discontinuous Galerkin method, while diffusion anisotropies remain purely local and impact the constants through the square root of the condition number of the diffusion tensor. For dominant advection, it is shown, in the spirit of previous work by Verfürth on continuous finite elements, that the constants are bounded by the square root of the local Péclet number

On Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Singularly Perturbed and Incompressible Miscible Displacement Problems

This thesis is concerned with the numerical approximation of problems of fluid flow, in particular the stationary advection diffusion reaction equations and the time dependent, coupled equations of incompressible miscible displacement in a porous medium. We begin by introducing the continuous discontinuous Galerkin method for the singularly perturbed advection diffusion reaction problem. This is a method which coincides with the continuous Galerkin method away from internal and boundary layers and with a discontinuous Galerkin method in the vicinity of layers. We prove that this consistent method is stable in the streamline diffusion norm if the convection field flows non-characteristically from the region of the continuous Galerkin to the region of the discontinuous Galerkin method. We then turn our attention to the equations of incompressible miscible displacement for the concentration, pressure and velocity of one fluid in a porous medium being displaced by another. We show a reliable a posteriori error estimator for the time dependent, coupled equations in the case where the solution has sufficient regularity and the velocity is bounded. We remark that these conditions may not be attained in physically realistic geometries. We therefore present an abstract approach to the stationary problem of miscible displacement and investigate an a posteriori error estimator using weighted spaces that relies on lower regularity requirements for the true solution. We then return to the continuous discontinuous Galerkin method. We prove in an abstract setting that standard (continuous) Galerkin finite element approximations are the limit of interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin approximations as the penalty parameter tends to infinity. We then show that by varying the penalization parameter on only a subset of the domain we reach the continuous discontinuous method in the limit. We present numerical experiments illustrating this approach both for equations of non-negative characteristic form (closely related to advection diffusion reaction equations) and to the problem of incompressible miscible displacement. We show that we may practically determine appropriate discontinuous and continuous regions, resulting in a significant reduction of the number of degrees of freedom required to approximate a solution, by using the properties of the discontinuous Galerkin approximation to the advection diffusion reaction equation. We finally present novel code for implementing the continuous discontinuous Galerkin method in C++

Postprocessing of Non-Conservative Flux for Compatibility with Transport in Heterogeneous Media

A conservative flux postprocessing algorithm is presented for both steady-state and dynamic flow models. The postprocessed flux is shown to have the same convergence order as the original flux. An arbitrary flux approximation is projected into a conservative subspace by adding a piecewise constant correction that is minimized in a weighted $L^2$ norm. The application of a weighted norm appears to yield better results for heterogeneous media than the standard $L^2$ norm which has been considered in earlier works. We also study the effect of different flux calculations on the domain boundary. In particular we consider the continuous Galerkin finite element method for solving Darcy flow and couple it with a discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for an advective transport problem.Comment: 34 pages, 17 figures, 11 table

Interior Penalty Continuous and Discontinuous Finite Element Approximations of Hyperbolic Equations

In this paper we present in a unified setting the continuous and discontinuous Galerkin methods for the numerical approximation of the scalar hyperbolic equation. Both methods are stabilized by the interior penalty method, more precisely by the jump of the gradient across element faces in the continuous case whereas in the discontinuous case the stabilization of the jump of the solution and optionally of its gradient is required to achieve optimal convergence. We prove that the solution in the case of the continuous Galerkin approach can be considered as a limit of the discontinuous one when the stabilization parameter associated with the penalization of the solution jump tends to infinity. As a consequence, the limit of the numerical flux of the discontinuous method yields a numerical flux for the continuous method as well. Numerical results will highlight the theoretical results that are proven in this pape

A posteriori error control for discontinuous Galerkin methods for parabolic problems

We derive energy-norm a posteriori error bounds for an Euler time-stepping method combined with various spatial discontinuous Galerkin schemes for linear parabolic problems. For accessibility, we address first the spatially semidiscrete case, and then move to the fully discrete scheme by introducing the implicit Euler time-stepping. All results are presented in an abstract setting and then illustrated with particular applications. This enables the error bounds to hold for a variety of discontinuous Galerkin methods, provided that energy-norm a posteriori error bounds for the corresponding elliptic problem are available. To illustrate the method, we apply it to the interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method, which requires the derivation of novel a posteriori error bounds. For the analysis of the time-dependent problems we use the elliptic reconstruction technique and we deal with the nonconforming part of the error by deriving appropriate computable a posteriori bounds for it.Comment: 6 figure

On the design of discontinuous Galerkin methods for elliptic problems based on hybrid formulations

The objective of this paper is to present a framework for the design of discontinuous Galerkin (dG) methods for elliptic problems. The idea is to start from a hybrid formulation of the problem involving as unknowns the main field in the interior of the element domains and its fluxes and traces on the element boundaries. Rather than working with this three-field formulation, fluxes are modeled using finite difference expressions and then the traces are determined by imposing continuity of fluxes, although other strategies could be devised. This procedure is applied to four elliptic problems, namely, the convection-diffusion equation (in the diffusion dominated regime), the Stokes problem, the Darcy problem and the Maxwell problem. We justify some well known dG methods with some modifications that in fact allow to improve the performance of the original methods, particularly when the physical properties are discontinuous.Preprin