Hopf bifurcation of reaction-diffusion and Navier-Stokes equations under discretization

Summary. The long-time behaviour of numerical approximations to the solutions of a semilinear parabolic equation undergoing a Hopf bifurcation is studied in this paper. The framework includes reaction-diffusion and incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. It is shown that the phase portrait of a supercritical Hopf bifurcation is correctly represented by Runge-Kutta time discretization. In particular, the bifurcation point and the Hopf orbits are approximated with higher order. A basic tool in the analysis is the reduction of the dynamics to a two-dimensional center manifold. A large portion of the paper is therefore concerned with studying center manifolds of the discretization. Received March 18, 1997 / Revised version received February 19, 1998