On a numerical artifact of solving shallow water equations with a discontinuous bottom: Analysis and a nontransonic fix

In this paper, we study a numerical artifact of solving the nonlinear shallow water equations with a discontinuous bottom topography. For various first-order schemes, the numerical solution of the momentum will form a spurious spike at the discontinuous points of the bottom, which should not exist in the exact solution. The height of the spike cannot be reduced even after the mesh is refined. For subsonic problems, this numerical artifact may cause the wrong convergence to a function far away from the exact solution. To explain the formation of the spurious spike, we perform a convergence analysis by proving a Lax--Wendroff type theorem. It is shown that the spurious spike is caused by the numerical viscosity in the computation of the water height at the discontinuous bottom. The height of the spike is proportional to the magnitude of the viscosity constant in the Lax--Friedrichs flux. Motivated by this conclusion, we propose a modified scheme by adopting the central flux at the bottom discontinuity in the equation of mass conservation, and show that this numerical artifact can be removed in many cases. For various numerical tests with nontransonic Riemann solutions, we observe that the modified scheme is able to retrieve the correct convergence.Comment: 37 page

Numerical analysis of a spherical harmonic discontinuous Galerkin method for scaled radiative transfer equations with isotropic scattering

In highly diffusion regimes when the mean free path $\varepsilon$ tends to zero, the radiative transfer equation has an asymptotic behavior which is governed by a diffusion equation and the corresponding boundary condition. Generally, a numerical scheme for solving this problem has the truncation error containing an $\varepsilon^{-1}$ contribution, that leads to a nonuniform convergence for small $\varepsilon$. Such phenomenons require high resolutions of discretizations, which degrades the performance of the numerical scheme in the diffusion limit. In this paper, we first provide a--priori estimates for the scaled spherical harmonic ($P_N$) radiative transfer equation. Then we present an error analysis for the spherical harmonic discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method of the scaled radiative transfer equation showing that, under some mild assumptions, its solutions converge uniformly in $\varepsilon$ to the solution of the scaled radiative transfer equation. We further present an optimal convergence result for the DG method with the upwind flux on Cartesian grids. Error estimates of $\left(1+\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon)\right)h^{k+1}$ (where $h$ is the maximum element length) are obtained when tensor product polynomials of degree at most $k$ are used

Multi-symplectic discontinuous Galerkin methods for the stochastic Maxwell equations with additive noise

One- and multi-dimensional stochastic Maxwell equations with additive noise are considered in this paper. It is known that such system can be written in the multi-symplectic structure, and the stochastic energy increases linearly in time. High order discontinuous Galerkin methods are designed for the stochastic Maxwell equations with additive noise, and we show that the proposed methods satisfy the discrete form of the stochastic energy linear growth property and preserve the multi-symplectic structure on the discrete level. Optimal error estimate of the semi-discrete DG method is also analyzed. The fully discrete methods are obtained by coupling with symplectic temporal discretizations. One- and two-dimensional numerical results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods, and optimal error estimates and linear growth of the discrete energy can be observed for all cases

Discontinuous Galerkin methods for stochastic Maxwell equations with multiplicative noise

In this paper we propose and analyze finite element discontinuous Galerkin methods for the one- and two-dimensional stochastic Maxwell equations with multiplicative noise. The discrete energy law of the semi-discrete DG methods were studied. Optimal error estimate of the semi-discrete method is obtained for the one-dimensional case, and the two-dimensional case on both rectangular meshes and triangular meshes under certain mesh assumptions. Strong Taylor 2.0 scheme is used as the temporal discretization. Both one- and two-dimensional numerical results are presented to validate the theoretical analysis results