A convergent method for linear half-space kinetic equations

We give a unified proof for the well-posedness of a class of linear half-space equations with general incoming data and construct a Galerkin method to numerically resolve this type of equations in a systematic way. Our main strategy in both analysis and numerics includes three steps: adding damping terms to the original half-space equation, using an inf-sup argument and even-odd decomposition to establish the well-posedness of the damped equation, and then recovering solutions to the original half-space equation. The proposed numerical methods for the damped equation is shown to be quasi-optimal and the numerical error of approximations to the original equation is controlled by that of the damped equation. This efficient solution to the half-space problem is useful for kinetic-fluid coupling simulations

First-order aggregation models with alignment

We include alignment interactions in a well-studied first-order attractive-repulsive macroscopic model for aggregation. The distinctive feature of the extended model is that the equation that specifies the velocity in terms of the population density, becomes {\em implicit}, and can have non-unique solutions. We investigate the well-posedness of the model and show rigorously how it can be obtained as a macroscopic limit of a second-order kinetic equation. We work within the space of probability measures with compact support and use mass transportation ideas and the characteristic method as essential tools in the analysis. A discretization procedure that parallels the analysis is formulated and implemented numerically in one and two dimensions