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