A Crank-Nicolson scheme for the Landau-Lifshitz equation without damping

An accurate and efficient numerical approach, based on a finite difference method with Crank-Nicolson time stepping, is proposed for the Landau-Lifshitz equation without damping. The phenomenological Landau-Lifshitz equation describes the dynamics of ferromagnetism. The Crank-Nicolson method is very popular in the numerical schemes for parabolic equations since it is second-order accurate in time. Although widely used, the method does not always produce accurate results when it is applied to the Landau-Lifshitz equation. The objective of this article is to enumerate the problems and then to propose an accurate and robust numerical solution algorithm. A discrete scheme and a numerical solution algorithm for the Landau-Lifshitz equation are described. A nonlinear multigrid method is used for handling the nonlinearities of the resulting discrete system of equations at each time step. We show numerically that the proposed scheme has a second-order convergence in space and time.     

New conservative schemes with discrete variational derivatives for nonlinear wave equations

New conservative finite difference schemes for certain classes of nonlinear wave equations are proposed. The key tool there is “discrete variational derivative”, by which discrete conservation property is realized. A similar approach for the target equations was recently proposed by Furihata, but in this paper a different approach is explored, where the target equations are first transformed to the equivalent system representations which are more natural forms to see conservation properties. Applications for the nonlinear Klein–Gordon equation and the so-called “good” Boussinesq equation are presented. Numerical examples reveal the good performance of the new schemes.     

Analysis of finite element approximations of a phase field model for two-phase fluids

This paper studies a phase field model for the mixture of two immiscible and incompressible fluids. The model is described by a nonlinear parabolic system consisting of the nonstationary Stokes equations coupled with the Allen-Cahn equation through an extra phase induced stress term in the Stokes equations and a fluid induced transport term in the Allen-Cahn equation. Both semi-discrete and fully discrete finite element methods are developed for approximating the parabolic system. It is shown that the proposed numerical methods satisfy a discrete energy law which mimics the basic energy law for the phase field model. Error estimates are derived for the semi-discrete method, and the convergence to the phase field model and to its sharp interface limiting model are established for the fully discrete finite element method by making use of the discrete energy law. Numerical experiments are also presented to validate the theory and to show the effectiveness of the combined phase field and finite element approach.

     

A Positivity-preserving Finite Element Method for Quantum Drift-diffusion Model

In this paper, we propose a positivity-preserving finite element method for solving the three-dimensional quantum drift-diffusion model. The model consists of five nonlinear elliptic equations, and two of them describe quantum corrections for quasi-Fermi levels. We propose an interpolated-exponential finite element (IEFE) method for solving the two quantum-correction equations. The IEFE method always yields positive carrier densities and preserves the positivity of second-order differential operators in the Newton linearization of quantum-correction equations. Moreover, we solve the two continuity equations with the edge-averaged finite element (EAFE) method to reduce numerical oscillations of quasi-Fermi levels. The Poisson equation of electrical potential is solved with standard Lagrangian finite elements. We prove the existence of solution to the nonlinear discrete problem by using a fixed-point iteration and solving the minimum problem of a new discrete functional. A Newton method is proposed to solve the nonlinear discrete problem. Numerical experiments for a three-dimensional nano-scale FinFET device show that the Newton method is robust for source-to-gate bias voltages up to 9V and source-to-drain bias voltages up to 10V.     

Locally linearized fractional step methods for nonlinear parabolic problems

This work deals with the efficient numerical solution of a class of nonlinear time-dependent reaction-diffusion equations. Via the method of lines approach, we first perform the spatial discretization of the original problem by applying a mimetic finite difference scheme. The system of ordinary differential equations arising from that process is then integrated in time with a linearly implicit fractional step method. For that purpose, we locally decompose the discrete nonlinear diffusion operator using suitable Taylor expansions and a domain decomposition splitting technique. The totally discrete scheme considers implicit time integrations for the linear terms while explicitly handling the nonlinear ones. As a result, the original problem is reduced to the solution of several linear systems per time step which can be trivially decomposed into a set of uncoupled parallelizable linear subsystems. The convergence of the proposed methods is illustrated by numerical experiments.     

Convergence analysis of the FEM approximation of the first order projection method for incompressible flows with and without the inf-sup condition

In this paper we obtain convergence results for the fully discrete projection method for the numerical approximation of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations using a finite element approximation for the space discretization. We consider two situations. In the first one, the analysis relies on the satisfaction of the inf-sup condition for the velocity-pressure finite element spaces. After that, we study a fully discrete fractional step method using a Poisson equation for the pressure. In this case the velocity-pressure interpolations do not need to accomplish the inf-sup condition and in fact we consider the case in which equal velocity-pressure interpolation is used. Optimal convergence results in time and space have been obtained in both cases.     

Dissipative/conservative Galerkin method using discrete partial derivatives for nonlinear evolution equations

A new method is proposed for designing Galerkin schemes that retain the energy dissipation or conservation properties of nonlinear evolution equations such as the Cahn–Hilliard equation, the Korteweg–de Vries equation, or the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. In particular, as a special case, dissipative or conservative finite-element schemes can be derived. The key device there is the new concept of discrete partial derivatives. As examples of the application of the present method, dissipative or conservative Galerkin schemes are presented for the three equations with some numerical experiments.     

Conservative finite-difference scheme for computer simulation of contrast 3D spatial-temporal structures induced by a laser pulse in a semiconductor

The numerical approach for computer simulation of femtosecond laser pulse interaction with a semiconductor is considered under the formation of 3D contrast time-dependent spatiotemporal structures. The problem is governed by the set of nonlinear partial differential equations describing a semiconductor characteristic evolution and a laser pulse propagation. One of the equations is a Poisson equation concerning electric field potential with Neumann boundary conditions that requires fulfillment of the well-known condition for Neumann problem solvability. The Poisson equation right part depends on free-charged particle concentrations that are governed by nonlinear equations. Therefore, the charge conservation law plays a key role for a finite-difference scheme construction as well as for solvability of the Neumann difference problem. In this connection, the iteration methods for the Poisson equation solution become preferable than using direct methods like the fast Fourier transform. We demonstrate the following: if the finite-difference scheme does not possess the conservatism property, then the problem solvability could be broken, and the numerical solution does not correspond to the differential problem solution. It should be stressed that for providing the computation in a long-time interval, it is crucial to use a numerical method that possessing asymptotic stability property. In this regard, we develop an effective numerical approach—the three-stage iteration process. It has the same economic computing expenses as a widely used split-step method, but, in contrast to the split-step method, our method possesses conservatism and asymptotic stability properties. Computer simulation results are presented.     

Adaptive data distribution for concurrent continuation

Summary Continuation methods compute paths of solutions of nonlinear equations that depend on a parameter. This paper examines some aspects of the multicomputer implementation of such methods. The computations are done on a mesh connected multicomputer with 64 nodes.One of the main issues in the development of concurrent programs is load balancing, achieved here by using appropriate data distributions. In the continuation process, many linear systems have to be solved. For nearby points along the solution path, the corresponding system matrices are closely related to each other. Therefore, pivots which are good for theLU-decomposition of one matrix are likely to be acceptable for a whole segment of the solution path. This suggests to choose certain data distributions that achieve good load balancing. In addition, if these distributions are used, the resulting code is easily vectorized.To test this technique, the invariant manifold of a system of two identical nonlinear oscillators is computed as a function of the coupling between them. This invariant manifold is determined by the solution of a system of nonlinear partial differential equations that depends on the coupling parameter. A symmetry in the problem reduces this system to one single equation, which is discretized by finite differences. The solution of the discrete nonlinear system is followed as the coupling parameter is changed.This material is based upon work supported by the NSF under Cooperative Agreement No. CCR-8809615. The government has certain rights in this material.     

Relaxation approximation to bed-load sediment transport

In this work we propose and apply a numerical method based on finite volume relaxation approximation for computing the bed-load sediment transport in shallow water flows, in one and two space dimensions. The water flow is modeled by the well-known nonlinear shallow water equations which are coupled with a bed updating equation. Using a relaxation approximation, the nonlinear set of equations (and for two different formulations) is transformed to a semilinear diagonalizable problem with linear characteristic variables. A second order MUSCL-TVD method is used for the advection stage while an implicit–explicit Runge–Kutta scheme solves the relaxation stage. The main advantages of this approach are that neither Riemann problem solvers nor nonlinear iterations are required during the solution process. For the two different formulations, the applicability and effectiveness of the presented scheme is verified by comparing numerical results obtained for several benchmark test problems.     

An efficient nonlinear iteration scheme for nonlinear parabolic-hyperbolic system

A nonlinear iteration method named the Picard-Newton iteration is studied for a two-dimensional nonlinear coupled parabolic-hyperbolic system. It serves as an efficient method to solve a nonlinear discrete scheme with second spatial and temporal accuracy. The nonlinear iteration scheme is constructed with a linearization-discretization approach through discretizing the linearized systems of the original nonlinear partial differential equations. It can be viewed as an improved Picard iteration, and can accelerate convergence over the standard Picard iteration. Moreover, the discretization with second-order accuracy in both spatial and temporal variants is introduced to get the Picard-Newton iteration scheme. By using the energy estimate and inductive hypothesis reasoning, the difficulties arising from the nonlinearity and the coupling of different equation types are overcome. It follows that the rigorous theoretical analysis on the approximation of the solution of the Picard-Newton iteration scheme to the solution of the original continuous problem is obtained, which is different from the traditional error estimate that usually estimates the error between the solution of the nonlinear discrete scheme and the solution of the original problem. Moreover, such approximation is independent of the iteration number. Numerical experiments verify the theoretical result, and show that the Picard-Newton iteration scheme with second-order spatial and temporal accuracy is more accurate and efficient than that of first-order temporal accuracy.     

Characteristics difference method for incompressible miscible flow in porous media

Two-phase ,incompressible miscible flow in porous media is governed by a system ofnonlinear partial differential equations. The pressure equation ,which is e11iptic in appearance ,isdiseretizod by a standard five-points difference method, The concentration equation is treated byan impliclt finite difference method that appbes a form of the method of characterlstics to thetransport terms. A class of biquadlatle interpolation is introduced for the method of chracteristics.Convergence rate is proved to be O(△t h^2)。     

A note on conjugate gradient convergence

Summary. The one-dimensional discrete Poisson equation on a uniform grid with points produces a linear system of equations with a symmetric, positive-definite coefficient matrix. Hence, the conjugate gradient method can be used, and standard analysis gives an upper bound of ) on the number of iterations required for convergence. This paper introduces a systematically defined set of solutions dependent on a parameter , and for several values of , presents exact analytic expressions for the number of steps ) needed to achieve accuracy . The asymptotic behavior of these expressions has the form )} as and )} as . In particular, two choices of corresponding to nonsmooth solutions give , i.e., iteration counts independent of ; this is in contrast to the standard bounds. The standard asymptotic convergence behavior, , is seen for a relatively smooth solution. Numerical examples illustrate and supplement the analysis. Received August 30, 1995 / Revised version received January 23, 1996     

An exponential transformation based splitting method for fast computations of highly oscillatory solutions

Splitting, or decomposition, methods have been widely used for achieving higher computational efficiency in solving wave equations. A major concern has remained, however, if the wave number involved is exceptionally large. In the case, merits of a conventional splitting method may diminish due to the fact that tiny discretization steps need to be employed to compensate high oscillations. This paper studies an alternative way for solving highly oscillatory paraxial wave problems via a modified splitting strategy. In the process, an exponential transformation is first introduced to convert the underlying differential equation to coupled nonlinear equations. Then the resulted oscillation-free system is treated by a Local-One-Dimensional (LOD) scheme for desired accuracy, efficiency and computability. The splitting method acquired is asymptotically stable and easy to use. Computational experiments are given to illustrate our numerical procedures.     

Convergence of the modified discrete ordinates method for the anisotropic scattering transport equation

Criticality problem of nuclear tractors generally refers to an eigenvalue problem for the transport equations. In this paper, we deal with the eigenvalue of the anisotropic scattering transport equation in slab geometry. We propose a new discrete method which was called modified discrete ordinates method. It is constructed by redeveloping and improving discrete ordinates method in the space of L¹(X). Different from traditional methods, norm convergence of operator approximation is proved theoretically. Furthermore, convergence of eigenvalue approximation and the corresponding error estimation are obtained by analytical tools.     

On the coupled BEM and FEM for a nonlinear exterior Dirichlet problem in R2

Summary In this paper we apply the coupling of boundary integral and finite element methods to solve a nonlinear exterior Dirichlet problem in the plane. Specifically, the boundary value problem consists of a nonlinear second order elliptic equation in divergence form in a bounded inner region, and the Laplace equation in the corresponding unbounded exterior region, in addition to appropriate boundary and transmission conditions. The main feature of the coupling method utilized here consists in the reduction of the nonlinear exterior boundary value problem to an equivalent monotone operator equation. We provide sufficient conditions for the coefficients of the nonlinear elliptic equation from which existence, uniqueness and approximation results are established. Then, we consider the case where the corresponding operator is strongly monotone and Lipschitz-continuous, and derive asymptotic error estimates for a boundary-finite element solution. We prove the unique solvability of the discrete operator equations, and based on a Strang type abstract error estimate, we show the strong convergence of the approximated solutions. Moreover, under additional regularity assumptions on the solution of the continous operator equation, the asymptotic rate of convergenceO (h) is obtained.The first author's research was partly supported by the U.S. Army Research Office through the Mathematical Science Institute of Cornell University, by the Universidad de Concepción through the Facultad de Ciencias, Dirección de Investigación and Vicerretoria, and by FONDECYT-Chile through Project 91-386.     

Free boundary problems with nonlinear source terms

Summary The method of lines is used to semi-discretize the non-linear Poisson equation over a domain with a free boundary. The resulting multipoint free boundary problem is solved with a line Gauss-Seidel method which is shown to converge monotonically. The method of lines solution is then shown to converge to the continuous solution of the variational inequality form of the obstacle problem. Some numerical results for the diffusion-reaction equation indicate that the method is applicable to more general free boundary problems for nonlinear elliptic equations.This research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office under Contract DAAG-79-0145     

Erratum to: Integration of the Continual System of Nonlinear Interaction Waves

We derive the continual system of nonlinear interaction waves from the compatibility of the transport equation on the whole line and the equation governing the time-evolution of the eigenfunctions of the transport operator. The transport equation represents the continual generalization from the n-component system of first-order ordinary differential equations. The continual system describes a nonlinear interaction of waves. We prove that the continual system can be integrated by the inverse scattering method. The method is based on applying the results of the inverse scattering problem for the transport equation to finding the solution of the Cauchy initial-value problem for the continual system. Indeed, the transition operator for the scattering problem admits right and left Volterra factorizations. The intermediate operator for this problem determines the one-to-one correspondence between the preimages of a solution of the transport equation. This operator is related to the transition operator and admits not only right and left Volterra factorizations but also the analytic factorization. By virtue of this fact the potential in the transport equation is uniquely reconstructed in terms of the solutions of the fundamental equations in inverse problem.     

Fast solution of elliptic control problems

Elliptic control problems with a quadratic cost functional require the solution of a system of two elliptic boundary-value problems. We propose a fast iterative process for the numerical solution of this problem. The method can be applied to very special problems (for example, Poisson equation for a rectangle) as well as to general equations (arbitrary dimensions, general region). Also, nonlinear problems can be treated. The work required is proportional to the work taken by the numerical solution of a single elliptic equation.     

Diffusive approximations for a class of nonlinear parabolic equations

We study a class of discrete velocity type approximations to nonlinear parabolic equations with source. After proving existence results and estimates on the solution to the relaxation system, we pass into the limit towards a weak solution, which is the unique entropy solution if the coefficients of the parabolic equation are constant.